Quantitative Monitoring of the Underwater Environment

This volume constitutes the results of the International Conference on Underwater Environment, MOQESM'14, held at "Le Quartz" Conference Center in Brest, France, on October 14-15,2014, within the framework of the 9th Sea Tech Week, International Marine Science and TechnologyEvent. The objective of MOQESM'14 was to bring together researchers from both academia and industry, interested in marine robotics and hydrography with application to the coastal environment mapping and underwater infrastructures surveys. The common thread of the conference is the combination of technical control, perception, andlocalization, typically used in robotics, with the methods of mapping and bathymetry. The papers presented in this book focus on two main topics. Firstly, coastal and infrastructure mapping is addressed, focusing not only on hydrographic systems,but also on positioning systems, bathymetry, and remote sensing. The proposed methods rely onacoustic sensors such as side scan sonars, multibeam echo sounders, phase-measuring bathymetricsonars, as well as optical systems such as underwater laser scanners. Accurate underwaterpositioning is also addressed in the case of the use of a single acoustic beacon, and the latestadvances in increasing the vertical precision of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) are alsopresented. Most of the above mentioned works are closely related to autonomous marine vehicles. Consequently,the second part of the book describes someworks concerning the methods associated with such typeof vehicles. The selected papers focus on autonomous surface or underwater vehicles, detailing newapproaches for localization, modeling, control, mapping, obstacle detection and avoidance, surfacing,and software development. Some of these works imply acoustics sensing as well as imageprocessing. Set membership methods are also used in some papers. The applications of the work presented in this book concern in particular oceanography, monitoring ofoil and gas infrastructures, and military field.