Visual Navigation for Recovering an AUV by Another AUV in Shallow Water

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) play very important roles in underwater missions. However, the reliability of the automated recovery of AUVs has still not been well addressed. We propose a vision-based framework for automatically recovering an AUV by another AUV in shallow water. The proposed framework contains a detection phase for the robust detection of underwater landmarks mounted on the docking station in shallow water and a pose-estimation phase for estimating the pose between AUVs and underwater landmarks. We propose a Laplacian-of-Gaussian-based coarse-to-fine blockwise (LCB) method for the detection of underwater landmarks to overcome ambient light and nonuniform spreading, which are the two main problems in shallow water. We propose a novel method for pose estimation in practical cases where landmarks are broken or covered by biofouling. In the experiments, we show that our proposed LCB method outperforms the state-of-the-art method in terms of remote landmark detection. We then combine our proposed vision-based framework with acoustic sensors in field experiments to demonstrate its effectiveness in the automated recovery of AUVs.