Pose Estimation for Underwater Vehicles using Light Beacons★ ★

This paper presents an approach for estimating the relative location and orientation between two or more underwater vehicles operating in tight formation. One of the vehicles is equipped with a camera of wide field of view. The other vehicle(s) are equipped with active light markers to enable the use of computer vision for pose estimation. The pose estimation addresses two scenarios, which are both important from the operational point of view. The first pertains to the availability of an acoustic communication channel which allows for exchanging attitude data and acoustic ranging, and use it in the pose estimation procedure. The second corresponds to the exclusive use of a set of 4 or more optical beacons with no acoustic information exchange, which is a capability that has not been yet proposed nor demonstrated in underwater vehicles. The contributions can be summarize as (1) a novel method of estimating the pose of an autonomous underwater vehicle using light beacons and other sensors when available, (2) an automated marker configuration analysis approach. Performance of the pose estimation approach is evaluated using synthetic and real data.