The development of automated undersea robot vehicles will be of
significant importance in the future exploitation of offshore mineral
resources, in environmental control and monitoring, and in aquatic
agriculture. Current work on undersea vehicles concentrates on the
development of accurate position and attitude estimation and control
methods using scanning sonar to provide terrain aiding information
from either a man-made structure or from the sea bed. Key elements of
this work include the development of sonar feature models, the
tracking and use of these models in mapping and position estimation,
and the development of low-speed platform models used in vehicle
control. Our Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, the AUV Sirius, is used
for experimental work in navigation and platform control. The vehicle
is equipped with a high resolution stereo camera pair together with scanning low frequency terrain-aiding sonars, DVL, USBL and depth sensor.
 Sample images of sponge gardens acquired off the West Australian Coast
near Ningaloo Reef. These images were taken at 80m depth.
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