On-board sensor fusion scheme for autonomous underwater vehicle navigation in submarine cable inspection

This paper presents a sensor fusion scheme for following underwater cables by autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). The two main practical problems encountered in cable following are considered; 1) navigation of AUV when the cable is invisible in the image, and 2) selection of the correct cable (interested feature) when there are many similar features appearing in the image. The proposed sensor fusion scheme uses dead-reckoning position uncertainty with a 2D position model of the cable to predict the region of interest in the image. This reduces the image processing data, increases the processing speed and avoids tracking other similar features appearing in the image. The proposed method uses a 2D position model of the cable for AUV navigation when the cable features are invisible in the predicted region. An experiment is conducted to test the performance of the proposed system using the AUV "Twin-Burger 2". The experimental results presented in this paper show how the proposed method handles the above-mentioned practical problems.