The "Bathy-drone" for Underwater Survey, Mapping and Inspection

The

Overview

We aim to create and test a system capable of measuring underwater areas and features in areas highly prone to change, including but not limited to coastal areas, tidal zones, ports, canals or water bodies that have an immediate impact on the hydrologic health of an ecosystem. The “bathydrone” is an unpowered boat equipped with a down-scan and side-scan sonar transducer mounted on the hull, towed by a medium-sized UAV.

Research Goals

  • Efficient Underwater 3D Point Cloud Mapping using Sonar
  • “Dual-control”: developing a path planning and control algorithm for the drone such that the sonar unit can scan the targeted area. Considering bridge inspection applications, collision avoidance will also be considered in this algorithm.
  • Underwater camera and sonar fusion: bathydrone system can equip underwater camera inside. By utilizing underwater camera and sonar data obtained from the same pose, sensor fusion algorithm will be developed to improve accuracy in underwater environment monitoring.

Related Publications

  1. A. L. Diaz, A. E. Ortega, H. Tingle, A. Pulido, O. Cordero, M. Nelson, N. E. Cocoves, J. Shin, R. R. Carthy, B. E. Wilkinson, and P. G. Ifju, “The bathy-drone: An autonomous uncrewed drone-tethered sonar system,” Drones, vol. 6, no. 10, 2022, issn: 2504-446X. [Online]. Available: [Paper]
  2. A. Pulido, A. Diaz, A. Ortega, P. Ifju, and J. Shin, “Trajectory planning and control of bathy-drone: A drone towing a boat equipped with sonar for bathymetry mapping,” in AIAA SCITECH 2023 Forum, 2023, p. 1811
  3. A. Pulido, R. Qin, A. Diaz, A. Ortega, P. Ifju, and J. J. Shin, “Time and cost-efficient bathymetric mapping system using sparse point cloud generation and automatic object detection,” in OCEANS 2022, Hampton Roads, 2022, pp. 1–8. doi: 10.1109/OCEANS47191.2022.9977073 [Preprint] [Paper]

Research Team

PI: Peter Ifju (UF)
Co-PI: Jane Shin
Participants from APRILab: Andres Pulido, Alex Baker, Blake Sanders, Nicholas Sardinia

Acknowledgement

This work is supported by Aurigo Software Technologies. Aurigo Logo

Additional Resources