Full Length ArticleReflections on a decade of autonomous underwater vehicles operations for marine survey at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics
Introduction
Recent years have seen significant advances in the use of autonomous and remotely operated vehicles for seafloor survey. Work undertaken over the past decade at the University of Sydney’s Australian Centre for Marine Robotics has focused on the development and deployment of numerous vehicles and imaging platforms in support of applications in engineering science, marine ecology, archaeology and geoscience. As part of this work, we have operated an Australia-wide benthic observing program designed to deliver precisely navigated, repeat imagery of the seafloor. This initiative makes extensive use of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) to collect high-resolution stereo imagery, multibeam sonar and water column measurements on an annual or semi-annual basis at sites around Australia, spanning the full latitudinal range of the continent from tropical reefs in the north to temperate regions in the south. We have also contributed to expeditions to document coral bleaching, cyclone recovery, submerged neolithic settlement sites, ancient shipwrecks, methane seeps and deepwater hydrothermal vents. We briefly consider how automated tools for working with this imagery have facilitated the resulting science outcomes. This paper provides an overview of this program of work and illustrates how these tools are being used in a routine manner in support of these programs.
The remainder of this paper is organised as follows. Section 2 provides an overview of the platforms that have been used to support this work while Section 3 describes the core capabilities used to deliver geo-referenced benthic imagery and associated data products. Section 4 outlines applications of these systems during deployments conducted at sites around Australia and internationally and illustrates how our end users are using this data. Section 5 presents concluding remarks and considers future directions for this program.
Section snippets
Platforms
Over the years, we have operated a number of platforms for collecting high-quality, stereoscopic imagery of underwater scenes. Fig. 1 provides an overview of some of these platforms. In early work, we used a small ROV built at the University of Sydney to collect co-registered acoustic and imaging data to allow us to study methods for fusing this information to estimate the vehicle’s trajectory and build maps of underwater habitats, including deployments on the Great Barrier Reef (Williams &
Navigation, mapping and 3D terrain modelling
Navigation is a fundamental competency required by AUV systems. Without direct access to GPS when submerged, these platforms must rely on external aiding to complement information collected by their internal sensors. This requirement has led to numerous studies examining techniques for AUV navigation and localisation. We refer readers to a recent survey article that provides a comprehensive overview of recent work in this area (Paull, Saeedi, Seto, & Li, 2014). Our early work focused on the
Applications
Based on the technologies developed over the course of more than a decade of operating marine imaging systems, we have been invited to participate in additional studies at sites around the world. This has included surveys in support of studies in ecological, archaeological and geoscience. Fig. 5 shows the deployment locations and partners involved in supporting this work.
Conclusions and future work
AUVs present important tools for collecting rich, high resolution, geo-referenced data sets. Managing the data and transforming it into data products continues to be a key challenge. We are engaging with a number of user communities in exploring the application of these technologies to a variety of application domains. Exciting challenges and novel applications will likely continue to drive developments in these areas.
Our future work will focus on the development of novel imaging payloads,
Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the Australian Research Council and the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) through the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (DIISR) National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Scheme. We also thank the many collaborators who have made this work possible and the Captains and crews of all of the vessels used to facilitate the deployment and recovery of the vehicle. We also acknowledge the help of all those who have contributed to the
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