Towards autonomous lakeshore monitoring

Abstract

This paper works towards autonomous lakeshore monitoring, which involves long-term operation over a large-scale, natural environment. Natural environments widely vary in appearance over time, which reduces the effectiveness of many appearance-based data association techniques.Rather than perform monitoring using appearance-based features, we are investigating whether the lakeshore geometry can provide a stable feature for this task. We have deployed an autonomous surface vessel 30 times over a duration of 8 months. This paper describes our initial analyses of this data, including our work towards a full simultaneous localization and mapping system and the shortcomings of using appearance-based features.