{"ID":22952757,"CreatedAt":"2026-09-17T02:12:05.498442134Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-09-20T18:11:56.143995915Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18893","arxiv_id":"2609.18893","title":"SOL-SLAM: Inverse Compositional Gauss-Newton Direct Registration for Fast Sonar-Only Local SLAM","abstract":"Autonomous underwater navigation typically relies on complex and expensive multi-modal sensor suites designed to prioritize global Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) accuracy. However, local reactive behaviors such as coarse navigation and obstacle avoidance require only local consistency---a capability that should be feasible using only a Forward-Looking Sonar (FLS), yet remains largely unaddressed, leaving a critical gap in FLS-only local SLAM. Moreover, existing acoustic SLAM frameworks predominantly rely on sparse feature extraction methods that discard substantial portions of the already information-sparse acoustic returns. To overcome these limitations, this work introduces a dense direct registration approach that aligns full acoustic intensity scans to a recursively updated local map. Real-time execution is achieved via an Inverse Compositional Gauss-Newton optimization strategy that minimizes computational overhead. Experimental evaluations show that this dense method yields significant improvements on translation error compared to sparse keypoint baselines, maintaining stable sub-meter tracking precision over wide displacement gaps. Moreover, this approach delivers odometry performance comparable to multi-sensor fusion pipelines (FLS, DVL, and IMU), bypassing expensive payload dependencies in feature-rich environments. We validate real-world applicability through AUV field trials, running the full local SLAM approach onboard an embedded, resource-constrained computer.","short_abstract":"Autonomous underwater navigation typically relies on complex and expensive multi-modal sensor suites designed to prioritize global Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) accuracy. However, local reactive behaviors such as coarse navigation and obstacle avoidance require only local consistency---a capability that...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18893","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.18893v1","authors":"[\"Kalvik Jakkala\",\"Jason O'Kane\"]","published":"2026-09-16T16:25:11Z","proceeding":"cs.RO","tasks":"[\"cs.RO\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}