AquaVis: A Perception-Aware Autonomous Navigation Framework for Underwater Vehicles

Abstract: Visual monitoring operations underwater require both observing the objects of interest in close-proximity, and tracking the few feature-rich areas necessary for state estimation.This paper introduces the first navigation framework, called AquaVis, that produces on-line visibility-aware motion plans that enable Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) to track multiple visual objectives with an arbitrary camera configuration in real-time. Using the proposed pipeline, AUVs can efficiently move in 3D, reach their goals while avoiding obstacles safely, and maximizing the visibility of multiple objectives along the path within a specified proximity. The method is sufficiently fast to be executed in real-time and is suitable for single or multiple camera configurations. Experimental results show the significant improvement on tracking multiple automatically-extracted points of interest, with low computational overhead and fast re-planning times