Model-based underwater inspection via viewpoint planning using octomap
Bruno Locks Floriani, Narcís Palomeras, Lucas Weihmann, Henrique Simas, Pere Ridao · OCEANS 2017 – Anchorage · 2017
During the last years, the underwater inspection of industrial assets, archaeological shipwrecks or geological/biological structures has become an area of interest. Nowadays, these inspections are done by divers or remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). This paper presents a preliminary solution for planning automatic underwater inspections for an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) assuming an a priori known environment. The proposed algorithm computes the viewpoints that an AUV has to reach in order to completely scan the region/structure of interest. Then, two optimization steps are taken into account: the number of viewpoints to cover the object and the order and path to reach them. Despite the algorithm uses a brute force approach, the utilization of octree based structures to represent the environment allows to obtain satisfactory results in a short time. The proposed method is evaluated in simulation using Gazebo and the Girona 500 AUV.