Scanning Sonar Data From an Underwater Robot With Ground Truth Localization

Abstract

Mechanical Scanning Sonars (MSS) are popular underwater sensors for Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUV) due to their low cost, small size, and low power consumption. But due to their simplicity, there are also many research challenges related to their usage. Unfortunately, there is also a lack of data with ground truth UUV localization. We provide MSS datasets using a UUV with standard navigation sensors, i.e., an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and a Doppler Velocity Log (DVL). The UUV is globally localized with a high precision optical tracking system in a large research pool to provide ground truth. The data is of interest for multiple research areas related to MSS, e.g., extraction of range information, registration of sonar scans, and especially mapping including Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Different parameter settings and environment conditions are covered, e.g., dynamics in the scene. The IMU and DVL data is also of interest for research on navigation independent of the MSS data. Results from navigation and mapping with an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) are in addition provided as baseline solutions.

Keywords

• Marine robotics
• mechanical scanning sonar
• mechanical scanning imaging sonar
• navigation
• simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM)
• optical tracking