Archimedes Spiral-based Coverage Path for AUVs with Range-only Beacon Localization

The lawnmower is a widely used path for autonomous vehicles in coverage planning missions. However, when used in conjunction with single beacon-based navigation, the straight line excursions in the lawnmower path can result in higher uncertainty in the vehicle's position estimate. In this work, we investigate the Archimedes spiral as an alternative coverage path in single beacon navigation. With a unicycle model for the vehicle, we show that the proposed path preserves the observability of the system using tools from Lie algebra. We further compare the proposed path against the lawnmower in simulation using an extended Kalman filter for state estimation and show that the proposed solution has better error performance.