AUV Benthic Habitat Mapping in South Eastern Tasmania

Abstract

This paper describes a two week deployment of the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Sirius on the Tasman Peninsula in SE Tasmania and in the Huon Marine Protected Area (MPA) to the South West of Hobart. The objective of the deployments described in this work were to document biological assemblages associated with rocky reef systems in shelf waters beyond normal diving depths. At each location, multiple reefs were surveyed at a range of depths from approximately 50 m to 100 m depth. We illustrate how the AUV based imaging complements benthic habitat assessments to be made based on the ship-borne swath bathymetry. Over the course of the 10 days of operation, 19 dives were undertaken with the AUV covering in excess of 70 linear kilometers of survey and returning nearly 160,000 geo-referenced high resolution stereo image pairs. These are now being analysed to describe the distribution of benthic habitats in more detail.

Multimodal information-theoretic measures for autonomous exploration

“…Table I shows the distribution of labels for each dive within this dataset, along with the entropy of this label distribution. 1 In all, 20 dives were performed, but only 11 are used in this study. The remaining dives were either of insufficient length or did not contain a sufficient variety of habitat classes.…”

“…The images obtained by an AUV can be used to perform benthic habitat mapping, classifying the seafloor (benthos) into habitat categories that summarise the biological and physical properties of each location [1].…”

AUV-enabled adaptive underwater surveying for optimal data collection

“…For a reasonably sized mission area, the distribution of the ripple orientations should be unimodal since sand ripples are created mainly by currents and waves [36][37][38]. 2 The result of the ripple detection algorithm effectively performs binary classification, segmenting the mission area according to whether each seabed location is characterized by sand ripple shadows. Let the binary information map, J , at a location (x, y) be equal to unity if the location is not characterized by shadows cast by a sand ripple; otherwise, J (x, y) = 0.…”

“…The high-resolution imaging of underwater environments afforded by sonar has proven useful in a wide range of applications, including habitat mapping [1,2], seabed D. P. Williams (B) NATO Undersea Research Centre, Viale San Bartolomeo 400, 19126 La Spezia (SP), Italy e-mail: williams@nurc.nato.int classification [3][4][5], mine detection [6,7], port protection [8], archaeology [9], and pipeline monitoring [10]. Thanks to breakthroughs in marine robot technology, the sonar data used to address these diverse tasks is invariably collected by an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV).…”

Surface Reconstruction of Maltese Cisterns Using ROV Sonar Data for Archeological Study

“…[3], [4,5], [6],and [2]), which has seen less attention when compared to mapping in other environments. Regardless, there are a large number of significant real life applications that can benefit from such technology including oceanography [7], marine biology [8], and archaeology [6], as well as for robot navigation (e.g. [9,10]).…”