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Precision navigation and mapping under bridges with an unmanned surface vehicle

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Abstract

Navigation relative to the surrounding physical structures and obstacles is an important capability for safe vehicle operation. This capability is particularly useful for unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) operating near large structures such as bridges, waterside buildings, towers and cranes, where global positioning system signals are restricted or unavailable due to the line-of-sight restrictions. This study proposes a high-precision navigation technique using dead-reckoning sensors and lidars, which enables building a parameterized map of artificial bridge structures and estimating the vehicle’s position relative to the parameterized map simultaneously. Also, three-dimensional reconstruction of the surrounding structures is carried out by fusing camera and lidar measurements for realistic 3D visual mapping which may facilitate automated surveys and inspection of structural safety. Field experiments using a newly developed USV system in a real-world bridge environment were performed to verify and demonstrate the performance of the proposed navigation and mapping algorithms. The field test results are presented and discussed in this paper.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by KI Project through KAIST Institute of Design of Complex Systems.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Ocean Systems Engineering, KAIST, Daejeon, Korea

    Jungwook Han, Jeonghong Park, Taeyun Kim & Jinwhan Kim

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  1. Jungwook Han
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  2. Jeonghong Park
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  3. Taeyun Kim
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  4. Jinwhan Kim
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Correspondence to Jinwhan Kim.

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Han, J., Park, J., Kim, T. et al. Precision navigation and mapping under bridges with an unmanned surface vehicle. Auton Robot 38, 349–362 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-015-9419-2

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