Underwater robot navigation around a sphere using electrolocation sense and Kalman filter

Vincent Lebastard (1) , Christine Chevallereau (1) , Ali Amrouche (1) , Brahim Jawad (1) , Alexis Girin (1) , Frédéric Boyer (1) , Pol-Bernard Gossiaux (2)

1 IRCCyN - Institut de Recherche en Communications et en Cybernétique de Nantes
2 SUBATECH - Laboratoire SUBATECH Nantes

The aim of this paper is to perform the navigation of an underwater robot equipped with a sensor using the electric sense. The robot navigates in an unbounded environment in presence of spheres. This sensor is inspired of some species of electric fish. A model of this sensor composed of n spherical electrodes is established. The variations of the current due to the presence of the sphere is related to the model of Rasnow [3]. Unscented Kalman Filter is used to localize the robot with respect to the sphere and to estimate the size of the sphere. We show that bio-inspired motions improve the detection of the spheres. We illustrate the efficiency of the method in two cases: a two electrodes sensor and a four electrodes sensor.

Domaines: Automatique / Robotique

Vincent Lebastard, Christine Chevallereau, Ali Amrouche, Brahim Jawad, Alexis Girin, et al.. Underwater robot navigation around a sphere using electrolocation sense and Kalman filter. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Oct 2010, Taipei, Taiwan. pp.4225-4230, ⟨10.1109/IROS.2010.5648929⟩. ⟨hal-00634830⟩