Sunflower

Abstract

Locating underwater robots is fundamental for enabling important underwater applications. The current mainstream method requires a physical infrastructure with relays on the water surface, which is largely ad-hoc, introduces a significant logistical overhead, and entails limited scalability. Our work, Sunflower, presents the first demonstration of wireless, 3D localization across the air-water interface -eliminating the need for additional infrastructure on the water surface. Specifically, we propose a laser-based sensing system to enable aerial drones to directly locate underwater robots. The Sunflower system consists of a queen and a worker component on a drone and each tracked underwater robot, respectively. To achieve robust sensing, key system elements include (1) a pinholebased sensing mechanism to address the sensing skew at air-water boundary and determine the incident angle on the worker, (2) a novel optical-fiber sensing ring to sense weak retroreflected light, (3) a laser-optimized backscatter communication design that exploits laser polarization to maximize retroreflected energy, and (4) the necessary models and algorithms for underwater sensing. Realworld experiments demonstrate that our Sunflower system achieves average localization error of 9.7 cm with ranges up to 3.8 m and is robust against ambient light interference and wave conditions.