Active Planning of AUVs for 3D Reconstruction of Underwater Object using Imaging Sonar

In this paper, we propose an underwater object scanning scheme using AUV and imaging sonar. The 3D point cloud generation method using imaging sonar has vulnerabilities such as the undesired slope of the front surface, the sparsity of data, the absence of side and back data. To solve these problems, we present a multi-view scanning method instead of a single scan. To efficiently perform multiple scans without excessive time-consuming, the unit vector of the next path was selected by maximizing the area of beam reflection and orthogonality with previous paths. To verify the validity of the proposed method, simulation experiments were conducted for several cases such as various shapes of the object and the angle variation between AUV and object.