PhD Presentation: Online seabed coverage path planning for an autonomous marine vehicle based on sonar data
Efficient mapping of an unknown large-scale marine area using a side-scan sonar onboard an autonomous marine vehicle is often of great importance. It might also be important to scan some parts of an area under survey in more detail. In contrast to the standard offline static coverage problem solution for side-scan sonar missions based on the overlap-all sonar ranges lawnmower pattern, an online and data-driven side-scan sonar coverage solution is proposed. The proposed coverage algorithm(s) will provide a coverage solution based on local information gain computed from the side-scan sonar data during the mission execution. Apart from the coverage path planning problem, the problem of anomaly detection in side-scan sonar imagery will be addressed through the performance comparison of various image processing methods.