2023/09/19 by Jayesh Tripathi, Tripathi, Jayesh, Robin R. Murphy +1
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Engineering · Environmental Science · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Coastal and Marine Dynamics #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Remote Sensing and LiDAR Applications #Robotics (cs.RO) #Underwater Vehicles and Communication Systems
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2309.10269
openalex publication_date 2023/09/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Non-navigable rivers and retention ponds play important roles in buffering communities from flooding, yet emergency planners often have no data as to the volume of water that they can carry before flooding the surrounding. This paper describes a practical approach for using an uncrewed marine surface vehicle (USV) to collect and merge bathymetric maps with digital surface maps of the banks of shallow bodies of water into a unified volumetric model. The below-waterline mesh is developed by applying the Poisson surface reconstruction algorithm to the sparse sonar depth readings of the underwater surface. Dense above-waterline meshes of the banks are created using commercial structure from motion (SfM) packages. Merging is challenging for many reasons, the most significant is gaps in sensor coverage, i.e., the USV cannot collect sonar depth data or visually see sandy beaches leading to a bank thus the two meshes may not intersect. The approach is demonstrated on a Hydronalix EMILY USV with a Humminbird single beam echosounder and Teledyne FLIR camera at Lake ESTI at the Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service Disaster City complex.