Side Scan Sonar-based SLAM for Autonomous Algae Farm Monitoring

Abstract

The transition of seaweed farming to an alternative food source on an industrial scale relies on automating its processes through smart farming, equivalent to land agriculture. Key to this process are autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) via their capacity to automate crop and structural inspections. However, the current bottleneck for their deployment is ensuring safe navigation within farms, which requires an accurate, online estimate of the AUV pose and map of the infrastructure. To enable this, we propose an efficient side scan sonar-based (SSS) simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) framework that exploits the geometry of kelp farms via modeling structural ropes in the back-end as sequences of individual landmarks from each SSS ping detection, instead of combining detections into elongated representations. Our method outperforms state of the art solutions in hardware in the loop (HIL) experiments on a real AUV survey in a kelp farm. The framework and dataset can be found at https://github.com/julRusVal/sss_farm_slam.