  Both higher efficiency and cost reduction can be gained from automating
bathymetric surveying for offshore applications such as pipeline,
telecommunication or power cables installation and inspection on the seabed. We
present a SLAM system that optimizes the geo-referencing of bathymetry surveys
by fusing the dead-reckoning sensor data from the surveying vehicle with
constraints from the maximization of the geometric consistency of overlapping
regions of the survey. The framework has been extensively tested on bathymetric
maps from both simulation and several actual industrial surveys and has proved
robustness over different types of terrain. We demonstrate that our system is
able to maximize the consistency of the final map even when there are large
sections of the survey with reduced topographic variation. The framework has
been made publicly available together with the simulation environment used to
test it and some of the datasets.

Robotics