Mooring cable tracking using active vision for a biomimetic autonomous underwater vehicle

This study presents a localization system using visual information for guidance and navigation of a biomimetic autonomous underwater vehicle (BAUV). The BAUV tracks a mooring cable using two cameras and sonar. Sonar has good accuracy in detecting longitudinal distances but is poor in detecting lateral distances. Since a stereo image has quantization errors, for the cameras, measurement errors in lateral directions are less than those in the optic-axis direction. An extended Kalman filter was employed to combine observational information derived from the cameras and sonar of the mooring cable position with the navigation data of the BAUV. This work demonstrates, using water tank experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed tracking technique in decreasing uncertainty in position estimations of the BAUV and mooring cable.