Automatic tracking method for submarine cables and pipelines of AUV based on side scan sonar

Submarine cables and pipelines laid on the seafloor are critical infrastructures for energy transportation and communication transmission and must be inspected in a timely manner to determine maintenance needs. Autonomous inspection of cables (including pipelines) and their surroundings using underwater vehicles is difficult because of sensor myopia and deviations in cable routing. This study proposes an automatic cable-tracking method (ACTM) based on side-scan sonar (SSS) that endows autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) with autonomous decision-making capabilities to achieve fast localization and stable tracking of submarine cables with large uncertainties. Compared with the traditional predefined waypoint method, the proposed method decomposes the tasks into a series of independent behaviors according to operational objectives; thus, the AUV can perform online dynamic task replanning and realize an autonomous coverage search of the target region. When a cable is detected, the cable-tracking task is constructed as a path-following control problem on the horizontal plane. To reduce uncertainties caused by environmental noise and sensor measurement errors, a uniform motion model based on target tracking theory was used to model the virtual mass abstracted from the cable, and the states of the cable were estimated using the Kalman filter. Subsequently, an adaptive line-of-sight guidance algorithm for the SSS is established to dynamically adjust the look-ahead distance by introducing states such as cable curvature and angular change rate, which somewhat alleviates the tracking loss caused by the SSS short-sightedness. The proposed ACTM effectiveness and robustness were validated through numerical simulations and field tests. The results showed that the proposed method can achieve automatic search and adaptive tracking of cables, further reducing the role of humans in the task. •Automatic submarine cable-tracking method based on side-scan sonar.•Behavior-based planner endows AUVs with autonomous decision-making capabilities.•Introducing target tracking theory to model the point abstracted from the cable.•Adaptive line-of-sight method used to alleviate the influence of the myopic sensors.•Full-scale cable tracking tests were utilized for method verification.