Towards Under-ice Sensing using a Portable ROV

• Published in: OCEANS 2022, Hampton Roads
• Main Authors: Zhao, Lin, Zhou, Mingxi, Loose, Brice
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: DigitalCommons@URI 2022
• Subjects: Marine Robotics; Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV); Time Synchronization; Under-ice Navigation; Sea ice; Alaska
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/gsofacpubs/1834; https://doi.org/10.1109/OCEANS47191.2022.9977140

Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) have a promising future to explore the polar regions. In this paper, we present our progress on developing a self-contain inertial odometry for under-ice navigation. Firstly, a microcontroller-based hardware time synchronization for multiple devices is demonstrated. Moreover, we present a new IMU, Doppler Velocity Log (DVL) and Pressure dead-reckoning (DR) for state estimation and a robust initialization approach for underwater vehciels. Field trials have been conducted in Utqiagvik, Alaska in March 2022 to gather multi-sensor data under the sea ice. In this paper, we highlight the performance of our method by comparing to the robot_localization algorithm, a widely used open-source localization algorithm.