This letter studies the problem of autonomous naviga-tion for unmanned underwater vehicles, using computer vision for localization. Parallel tracking and mapping is employed to localize the vehicle with respect to a visual map, using a single camera, whereas an extended Kalman filter (EKF) is used to fuse the vi-sual information with data from an inertial measurement unit, in order to recover the scale of the map and improve the pose estima-tion. A proportional integral derivative controller controller with compensation of the restoring forces is proposed to accomplish trajectory tracking, where a pressure sensor and a magnetometer provide feedback for depth control and yaw, respectively, while the remaining states are provided by the EKF. Real-time experiments are presented to validate the navigation strategy, using a commer-cial remotely operated vehicle (ROV), the BlueROV2, which was adapted to perform as an autonomous underwater vehicle with the help of the robot operative system.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.