A High-Resolution Acoustic Camera for a Multi-legged Underwater Robot

Authors
Jin-Yeong Park, Hyuk Baek, Pan-Mook Lee, Bong-Huan Jun1

JOURNAL OF SHIPS & OCEAN ENGINEERING No.53 pp.59~67, 2013

Abstract - This paper describes a high-resolution acoustic camera as an identification sensor for a multi-legged underwater robot, CR200. The CR200 is supposed to inspect and work in high tidal current and low visibility environment. CR200 uses articulated six legs to thrust itself and control its attitude. The robot is equipped with three kinds of sensors to acquire underwater images. The first kind is conventional optical camera systems. The optical camera systems often fail depending on water turbidity and floating particles, however. The rest two sensors use acoustic beams. One is a single-beam scanning sonar and the other is a high resolution multi-beam acoustic camera. In this paper, characteristics and specifications of the acoustic camera are introduced. Differences between the optical camera and the acoustic camera are also described. Performance comparison with another multi-beam sonar which uses lower acoustic frequency is included. We conducted offshore experiments to acquire images and to test performance of integration between the CR200 and the acoustic camera.

(Pressed in Korean)