Flow feature extraction for underwater robot localization: Preliminary results

Underwater robots conventionally use vision and sonar sensors for perception purposes, but recently bio-inspired sensors that can sense flow have been developed. In literature, flow sensing has been shown to provide useful information about an underwater object and its surroundings. In the light of this, we develop an underwater landmark recognition technique which is based on the extraction and comparison of compact flow features. The proposed features are based on frequency spectrum of a pressure signal acquired by a piezo-resistive sensor. We report experiments in semi-natural (human-made flume with obstacles) and natural (river) underwater conditions where the proposed technique successfully recognizes previously visited locations.