Multisensor data fusion approach for terrain aided navigation of autonomous underwater vehicles

Autonomous navigation of underwater vehicles is a 'holy grail' of underwater robotics in many ways. For an AUV to continually estimate its pose (position and orientation) and operate within an unknown environment solely based on its onboard sensors is a very challenging problem. In this paper, commonly used AUV sensors such as Inertial Navigation System (INS), Forward Looking Sonar (FLS) and monocular CCD camera are considered. Paper also discusses a robust feature tracking technique from image sequences and thereby estimating the ego-motion. It also discusses about the trajectory recovery from the FLS and fusion of INS and FLS. Experimental results, conducted using the test-bed AUV 'NTU-UAV', are presented to highlight the performance of the proposed navigation scheme