AUV Waypoint Re-planning for Optimal Sonar Area Coverage

The ‘mow-the-lawn’ mission is an ubiquitous autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) mission that surveys the seafloor with equidistant transects and a conservative degree of across-track overlap within the region of interest (ROI). We ask – can this be done more effectively? Here we describe the preliminary development of an online autonomous transect replanning (OATR) algorithm for optimal sonar data coverage for implementation onto a survey grade AUV. Through simulation, we identified the algorithm improved complete sensor coverage (%) of the surveyed ROI by an average of 18.89% and improved the overall survey efficiency. In conclusion, this study shows that our OATR algorithm operates successfully in real time, improving the mission efficiency of a constant depth bathymetry survey mission through the reduction of mission time and improved total sensor coverage. In addition, the simulations verified that algorithm can be implemented onto an Explorer class AUV. Future work will examine the sensitivity of the algorithm to different survey operations, as well as direct implementation onto the Explore AUV for new research.