Title :
Computationally efficient underwater navigational strategy in electrically heterogeneous environments using electrolocation
Author :
Dimble, Kedar D. ; Ranganathan, Badri N. ; Keshavan, Jishnu ; Humbert, J. Sean
Author_Institution :
Autonomous Vehicles Lab., Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
Abstract :
Weakly electric fish use a navigational technique called electrolocation to investigate their surroundings for predator, prey and obstacles. Obstacles and other global stimuli are perceived as perturbations to the fish´s self-generated electric field, which provide relevant navigational cues to the fish. In this work a control strategy based on electrolocation for performing obstacle avoidance in electrically heterogeneous environments is presented and validated. The control strategy developed for a straight tunnel is shown to be robust to small variations in the tunnel width. This justifies its application to other heterogeneous corridor-like environments. Static output feedback control is shown to achieve the desired goal of reflexive obstacle avoidance in such environments in simulation and experimentation. The proposed approach is computationally inexpensive and readily implementable on a small scale underwater vehicle, making underwater autonomous navigation feasible in real-time.
Keywords :
autonomous underwater vehicles; collision avoidance; feedback; marine navigation; path planning; computationally efficient underwater navigational strategy; control strategy; electrically heterogeneous environments; electrolocation; fish self-generated electric field; global stimuli; heterogeneous corridor-like environments; navigational cues; navigational technique; perturbations; reflexive obstacle avoidance; small-scale underwater vehicle; static output feedback control; tunnel width; underwater autonomous navigation; weakly-electric fish; Collision avoidance; Mathematical model; Robot sensing systems; Sonar navigation; Trajectory; Vehicles;
Conference_Titel :
Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2015 IEEE International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Seattle, WA
DOI :
10.1109/ICRA.2015.7139339