Terrain mapping with forward looking sonar on unmanned underwater vehicles

Abstract

In the future, successful reconnaissance operations conducted in shallow water with Autonomous Underwater Vehicles will rely heavily on a high performance, high resolution, forward look sonar coupled with terrain mapping algorithms for object detectton, localization and classcfication, sea bottom mapping and feature extraction. This paper describes in detail a terrain mapping algorithm based on an advanced forward look sonar design. The development is illustrated with in-water results.