Hierarchical Topological Modeling of Marine Environment

Abstract

This paper presents a method of topological modeling for marine environment. The proposed method detects landmarks from underwater and above-water environment. The topological model is acquired by applying Delaunay triangulation to the detected landmarks. Nodes are defined as triangulated region of Delaunay triangulation and edges represent adjacency between two nodes. The proposed method constructs a hierarchical topological model considering detectable range of each sensor. It consists of two levels of topological maps. The first level map covers entire environment and each second level map represent details of each node of the first level map. The proposed method provides an efficient modeling method for marine environment. Experimental results are provided for a sea trial to verify the proposed environmental modeling method. The proposed method could be helpful for marine vehicles to perform given tasks.