Jakob Schwendner

Laser scanners are becoming increasingly interesting for industrial underwater applications. They offer higher resolution and accuracy compared to acoustic sensors, but also face limitations in challenging conditions. The optical properties of water are also a limitation on the transferability of technologies from the terrestrial domain. Laser stripers are the current state of the art for affordable underwater sensors, as time-of-flight systems do exist, but are expensive and bulky.

The Kraken SeaVision™ system combines a high-speed low-light color camera, with steerable red, green and blue lasers and a color LED light. This allows for a number of deployment options, and is especially suitable for vertical inspections of underwater structures. SeaVision has been tested in a combination of lab and real-life outdoor environments.

The content of this talk is to give an overview of the challenges, the technologies involved, and some examples of field data.

Dr Jakob Schwendner has been the Managing Director of Kraken Robotik GmbH, Bremen, Germany since 2017. Jakob brings 10 years at DFKI (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence) as an expert in autonomy, systems and software engineering for robotics, mission management, SLAM, navigation, embedded systems, sensor processing and sensor fusion. Jakob received his PhD on Robot Navigation in 2013 at the University of Bremen and since then led the autonomy team of the Robotics Innovation Center at the DFKI. He defined, managed and worked in numerous projects in the area of space and underwater robotics