Localization of AUVs using visual information of underwater structures and artificial landmarks

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) can perform flexible operations in complex underwater environments due to their autonomy. Localization is one of the key components of autonomous navigation. Since the inertial navigation system of an AUV suffers from drift, observing fixed objects in an inertial reference system can enhance the localization performance. In this paper, we propose a method of localizing AUVs by exploiting visual measurements of underwater structures and artificial landmarks. In a framework of particle filtering, a camera measurement model that emulates the camera’s observation of underwater structures is designed. The particle weight is then updated based on the extracted visual information of the underwater structures. Detected artificial landmarks are also used in the particle weight update. The proposed method is validated by experiments performed in a structured basin environment.