Topological Navigation for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles in Confined Semi-Structured Environments

Abstract

In this work, we present the design, implementation, and simulation of a topology-based navigation system for the UX-series robots, a spherical underwater vehicle designed to explore and map flooded underground mines. The objective of the robot is to navigate autonomously in the 3D network of tunnels of a semi-structured but unknown environment in order to gather geoscientific data. We start from the assumption that a topological map has been generated by a low-level perception and SLAM module in the form of a labeled graph. However, the map is subject to uncertainties and reconstruction errors that the navigation system must address. First, a distance metric is defined to compute node-matching operations. This metric is then used to enable the robot to find its position on the map and navigate it. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach, extensive simulations have been carried out with different randomly generated topologies and various noise rates.

Keywords

• underwater robots
• 3D navigation
• topological navigation
• labeled node matching