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Topological Navigation for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles in Confined Semi-Structured Environments
Claudio Rossi1, Adrian Caro Zapata1, Zorana Milosevic1
1Centre for Automation and Robotics UPM-CSIC, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28006 Madrid, Spain.
Sensors (Basel, Switzerland)
|March 11, 2023
Summary
This study introduces a topology-based navigation system for underwater robots exploring flooded mines. The system effectively guides robots through unknown 3D tunnels using a graph-based map, even with uncertainties.
Area of Science:
- Robotics
- Geoscience
- Autonomous Systems
Background:
- Flooded underground mines present complex, unknown 3D environments for exploration.
- Spherical underwater vehicles, like the UX-series robots, are suited for such challenging terrains.
- Accurate navigation is crucial for gathering geoscientific data in these environments.
Purpose of the Study:
- To design, implement, and simulate a topology-based navigation system for UX-series robots.
- To enable autonomous navigation in semi-structured, unknown 3D tunnel networks.
- To address uncertainties and errors in topological maps generated by perception and SLAM modules.
Main Methods:
- A topological map represented as a labeled graph is assumed as input.
- A novel distance metric is defined for node-matching operations.
- The metric is utilized for robot localization and path planning within the topological map.
Main Results:
- Extensive simulations demonstrate the system's effectiveness in navigating complex topologies.
- The navigation system successfully addresses map uncertainties and reconstruction errors.
- Performance was validated across various randomly generated tunnel network topologies and noise levels.
Conclusions:
- The proposed topology-based navigation system is effective for autonomous underwater exploration in flooded mines.
- The defined distance metric robustly handles map inaccuracies, enabling reliable robot localization.
- This approach facilitates efficient geoscientific data collection in challenging subterranean environments.
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