Range sonar array based SLAM for P-SURO AUV in a partially known environment

In this paper, we present a range sonar array based SLAM method for P-SURO AUV which is a test-bed for developing various underwater technologies. The vehicle's operating environment is a 12(L)x8(W)x6(D)m dimensional cuboid basin and its wall information is assumed to be known in priori. With this information, we propose an EKF (Extended Kalman Filter) SLAM method for the vehicle's operation in the basin. For range sonar, its measurement, in this paper, is modeled as a Gaussian distribution where the standard deviation is a function of sonar attack angle. Experimental studies are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed SLAM method.