Preliminary Research on Underwater Object Recognition and Localization Using Stereo Hand Eye System

Abstract

Recently, the necessity of marine autonomous work robots is emerging due to the shortage of manpower and aging of fishing villages. However, underwater object perception and recognition are much more difficult than on the ground. Underwater sonar sensors are difficult to utilize at close range, and vision sensors are difficult to use in water because not only short sensing range, but also the feature point uncertainty depending on turbidity, light intensity and direction. In this paper, we proposed a stereo hand eye system by mounting a camera on the end-tip of dual manipulators and changing the relative distance and direction between end-tip and object so that the feature points are picked up uniformly. In order to verify this system, the proposed system explored a certain target area in the water tank environment and tracked the target object. And then, the proposed system precisely estimated the underwater object position using the stereo vision algorithms.