Spatial and Temporal Autocalibration for Underwater Vehicles

The subsea industry is pushing for inspection and intervention vehicles with a high degree of autonomy which can ”live” and operate in connection with subsea facilities. Safety is often a major concern and high-quality calibration is essential for safe navigation with autonomous vehicles. This is because calibration quality is directly tied to the state estimation performance and thus the precision of navigation for autonomous vehicles. This paper presents an algorithm for calibrating the relative pose and time delay between sensors on a robotic vehicle using batch optimization on recorded real-world sensor data.