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Appearance-based odometry and mapping with feature descriptors for underwater robots

Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society volume 15, pages 47–54 (2009)Cite this article

Abstract

The use of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) for underwater tasks is a promising robotic field. These robots can carry visual inspection cameras. Besides serving the activities of inspection and mapping, the captured images can also be used to aid navigation and localization of the robots. Visual odometry is the process of determining the position and orientation of a robot by analyzing the associated camera images. It has been used in a wide variety of non-standard locomotion robotic methods. In this context, this paper proposes an approach to visual odometry and mapping of underwater vehicles. Supposing the use of inspection cameras, this proposal is composed of two stages: i) the use of computer vision for visual odometry, extracting landmarks in underwater image sequences and ii) the development of topological maps for localization and navigation. The integration of such systems will allow visual odometry, localization and mapping of the environment. A set of tests with real robots was accomplished, regarding online and performance issues. The results reveals an accuracy and robust approach to several underwater conditions, as illumination and noise, leading to a promissory and original visual odometry and mapping technique.

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Affiliations

  1. Universidade Federal do Rio Grande - FURG, Rio Grande, RS, Brazil

    Silvia Silva da Costa Botelho, Mônica da Silva Figueiredo, Celina Haffele Da Rocha & Gabriel Leivas Oliveira

  2. Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais - UFMG, Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil

    Paulo Lilles Jorge Drews Junior

Authors
  1. Silvia Silva da Costa Botelho
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  2. Paulo Lilles Jorge Drews Junior
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  3. Mônica da Silva Figueiredo
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  4. Celina Haffele Da Rocha
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  5. Gabriel Leivas Oliveira
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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Botelho, S.S.d.C., Drews Junior, P.L.J., Figueiredo, M.d.S. et al. Appearance-based odometry and mapping with feature descriptors for underwater robots. J Braz Comp Soc 15, 47–54 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03194505

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Keywords

  • Robotics
  • Computer Vision
  • Underwater Vehicles
  • Topological Maps
  • Self-localization and mapping