Cooperative 3D mapping under underwater communication constraints

Marine robots are so far mainly restricted to usage in open sea application where 2D maps are sufficient, however, full 3D information becomes more and more important in complex scenarios. These include complex inspection, construction, or maintenance missions that involve non-trivial structures as for example in oil- and gas-production and transport, underwater archeology, or harbor applications. In this paper, we present a graph based multi-robot mapping method that requires minimal communication bandwidth between the robots. We show that using this method, it is feasible to construct a large scale map under realistic bandwidth constraints imposed by available underwater sonic modems.