Underwater Sludge Detection System Based on Multi-Data Fusion

Underwater sludge greatly affects water quality, and it is an important task of urban maintenance to clean up the sludge in the urban rivers. To remove sludge, a critical step is to measure the location and depth of sludge accurately, which leads to a refined calculation of maintenance fee. A traditional method of measuring sludge is based on human experience, which is costly, and more importantly, calculation errors and low efficiency. In this paper, we introduce an intelligent and automatic underwater sludge detection system. Two sonars equipped on an unmanned ship provide the measurements of depth, which are fused using the Kalman-like method to obtain accurate measures of sludge depth. Our experiment shows that the system can detect sludge depth conveniently.