发表机构
School of Engineering & Physical Sciences, Heriot-Watt University; Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology（赫瑞瓦特大学工程与物理科学学院; 日本海洋研究开发机构）
机构由 AI 辅助整理，请以论文原文为准。AI 中文总结
该研究针对水下采样的自主航行器定位难题，提出接触辅助因子图定位框架，融合机械臂接触事件等多源信息，实验显示其可减少轨迹漂移并提升目标重访精度。
AI 中文摘要
自主水下航行器执行近距离海底采样时的精确状态估计仍具挑战性：低空作业时，俯视相机在无特征的平面海床上会产生尺度模糊、横向退化及特征跟踪不一致问题，而仅融合惯性-多普勒速度计程仪（DVL）无法实现结构漂移校正。本文提出接触辅助因子图定位（Contact-Aided Factor-Graph Localization）框架，将物理交互作为平滑式定位建模中的信息几何约束，该方法紧密融合吸盘式机械臂接触事件、自适应视觉里程计、学习目标检测及机载传感器；视觉里程计相对位姿因子与地标方位-距离因子会依据内点统计进行不确定性缩放，以避免视觉弱帧导致估计器失稳，同时接触事件被建模为高置信度因子，无需基于外观的地点识别即可诱导隐式回环。此外，系统可在运动过程中完全在线初始化。在水池、港口及仿真环境中的实验评估表明，与基于滤波的导航及无接触图公式相比，接触诱导约束显著减少了轨迹漂移并提升了目标重访精度，这些结果凸显了具身物理交互在感知退化的水下环境中作为定位基础的作用。
英文摘要
Accurate state estimation for autonomous underwater vehicles performing close-range seafloor sampling remains challenging. In low-altitude operation, down-looking cameras over featureless planar seabeds produce scale ambiguity, lateral degeneracy, and inconsistent feature tracking. Meanwhile, inertial-Doppler Velocity Log (DVL) fusion alone provides no mechanism for structural drift correction. We propose a Contact-Aided Factor-Graph Localization framework that treats physical interaction as an informative geometric constraint within a smoothing-based localization formulation. The method tightly fuses suction-based manipulator contact events with adaptive visual odometry, learned object detections, and on-board sensors. Visual odometry relative-pose factors and landmark bearing-range factors are uncertainty-scaled according to inlier statistics to prevent visually weak frames from destabilizing the estimator, while contact events are modeled as high-confidence factors that induce implicit loop closures without appearance-based place recognition. Furthermore, the system can fully initialize online during motion. Experimental evaluation in tanks, harbor, and simulation environments demonstrates that contact-induced constraints significantly reduce trajectory drift and improve object revisit accuracy compared to filtering-based navigation and contact-free graph formulations. These results highlight the role of embodied physical interaction as a localization primitive in perception-degraded underwater environments
