Acoustics Based Docking for a Coral Reef Monitoring Robot (C-Bot)

Underwater docking plays a vital role in supporting long-term operations by allowing autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to recharge and offload data without the need for launch and recovery operations. Existing vision based docking systems have limitations, such as discrepancies while dealing with bad lighting and visibility conditions, and there is a need for multiple sensors to counteract these constraints. This paper describes a reliable solution to these by using a 2D imaging sonar as the primary sensor. The software proposed in this paper was tested with a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation of the coral reef monitoring robot (C-Bot) as the target robot and a stationary dock.