Efficient Navigation Aware Seabed Coverage using AUVs

Area coverage and robot navigation are two important research fields within robotics. However, their intersection has received limited attention. In coverage problems, perfect navigation is often assumed, and in robot navigation, the focus is often to minimize the localization error while traveling a given trajectory.The need for integration of the two becomes clear in environments with very sparse features or landmarks, for example when an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) is to search the seafloor for dangerous objects, such as mines.The potential consequences of missing a mine due to navigation errors can be catastrophic.If the localization error is large, a trajectory that was designed to guarantee complete coverage might have missed significant parts of the area. Thus, the coverage trajectory must be planned with the navigation performance in mind, applying a combination of using large enough planned overlaps of sensor footprints to account for the position uncertainty, and reducing this uncertainty by re-visiting the known sparse landmarks. In this paper we compute trajectories that guarantee coverage for a given area under assumptions on worst case localization error growth.We further more compute upper bounds for how large areas can be covered using common coverage patterns and a single landmark, which leads to bounds on how sparse the landmarks can be in the regions to be covered.Swedish Maritime Research Centre (SMaRC