Real time path-planning of an AUV based on characteristics of passive acoustic landmarks for visual mapping of shallow vent fields

Although underwater vent fields are of great scientific interest, accurate visual mapping is difficult because of the presence of bubble plumes that degrade the accuracy of conventional acoustic positioning systems such as Long Base Line (LBL) and Super Short Base Line (SSBL). The authors had proposed a visual mapping method of shallow vent fields with an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) equipped with a profiling sonar, where positioning is based on vertical rod-shaped acoustic reflectors and bubble plumes. Although performance was verified through a series of experiments, there remain two challenges as follows. Firstly, observation is terminated if the vehicle was surrounded by bubble plumes, since the vehicle tries to avoid collision with not only artificial reflectors but also collision-safe bubble plumes. Secondly, the observation area drifts by disturbance since the waypoints are defined relative to the vehicle's position after descending close to seafloor. This paper proposes a real-time path planning method of an AUV as a part of the proposed observation method. The path of the vehicle is defined based on the types of landmarks as well as the geometric relationship between the vehicle and the landmarks. The vehicle can distinguish landmark types using a sheet laser and a camera. The proposed method was implemented on the AUV Tri-Dog 1 and a series of experiments were carried out in order to verify its performance.