Target recognition in sonar imagery has long been an active research area in the maritime domain, especially in the mine-counter measure context. Recently it has received even more attention as new sensors with increased resolution have been developed; new threats to critical maritime assets and a new paradigm for target recognition based on autonomous platforms have emerged. With the recent in...

Robotics research is dependent on intelligent, fast, accurate, reliable and cheap sensors. Sonar sensing can fulfil these requirements. Moreover sonar physics provides robotics researchers with a natural selection capability for landmark detection in navigation problems. This paper presents a new sonar system that produces accurate measurement and on-the-fly single cycle classification of plane...

We describe a sonar localisation system for autonomous mobile robot navigation in a known environment, which tries to extract as much information as possible from the sensors by building a detailed probabilistic model of each sonar event. It takes account of multiple hypotheses about the source of each signal and uses a probabilistic sensor fusion technique to merge the results into a single lo...

Motivated by inspection of complex underwater environments, we have developed a system for multi-sensor SLAM utilizing both structured and unstructured environmental features. We present a system for deriving planar constraints from sonar data, and jointly optimizing the vehicle and plane positions as nodes in a factor graph. We also present a system for outlier rejection and smoothing of 3D so...

This paper demonstrates experiments for performing adaptive terrain aided navigation in the context of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) equipped with sonar. The experiments were conducted using a 675 kHz sector scan sonar mounted on a planar robotic positioning system in a 3.0 by 9.0 by 1.0 meter testing tank, enabling controlled and repeatable scenarios. The objective of the adaptive stoc...

This paper describes ongoing work into a portable mobility aid, worn by the visually impaired. The system uses stereo vision and sonar sensors for obstacle avoidance and recognition of kerbs. Because the device is carried, the user is given freedom of movement over kerbs, stairs and rough ground, not traversable with a wheeled aid. Motion of the sensor due to the walking action is measured usin...

This paper presents a novel map building approach for path planning purposes, which takes into account the uncertainty inherent in sensor measurements. To this end, Bayesian estimation and Dempster-Shafer evidential theory are used to fuse the sensory information and to update the occupancy and evidential grid maps, respectively. The approach is illustrated using actual measurements from a labo...

This paper introduces matrix filters as a tool for localization and detection problems in passive sonar. The outputs of an array of sensors, at some given frequency, can be represented by a vector of complex numbers. A linear filtering operation on the sensor outputs can be expressed as the multiplication of a matrix (called a matrix filter) times this vector. The purpose of a matrix filter is ...

A mapmaking robot integrates accumulated sensor data into a data structure that can be used for future localization or planning operations. Localization is the process of determining the robot’s location within its environment. This paper describes experiments in which a robot simultaneously makes a map and localizes to that map. The map is a collection of tangent vectors constructed from store...

An acoustic ranging demonstration is presented in a reflective environment using solvable chaos with novel and practical hardware advances. Previously, was optimally detected ideal alignment, random codes an 11 element microphone array for environments free of multipath reflections. In this work, experiments were performed drastically reduced sensor measurements extended to include non-ideal ef...