Video: Sunflower: Locating Underwater Robots From the Air

Abstract

Locating underwater robots is fundamental for enabling important underwater applications. The current mainstream method requires a physical infrastructure with relays on the water surface, which is largely ad-hoc, introduces a significant logistical overhead, and entails limited scalability. Our work, Sunflower, is the first system demonstrating wireless, 3D localization across the air-water interface and eliminates the need for any sensing additional infrastructure. This demonstration video [1] evaluates the Sunflower system on a mobile drone and mobile underwater robot, showing the underwater robot's continuous ground-truth trajectory along with the Sunflower estimates at six discrete positions.