AURORA, A multi sensor dataset for robotic ocean exploration

The current maturity of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) has made their deployment practical and cost-effective, such that many scientific, industrial and military applications now include AUV operations. However, the logistical difficulties and high costs of operating at-sea are still critical limiting factors in further technology development, the benchmarking of new techniques and the reproducibility of research results. To overcome this problem, we present a freely available dataset suitable to test control, navigation, sensor processing algorithms and others tasks. This dataset combines AUV navigation data, side-scan sonar, multibeam echosounder data and seafloor camera image data, and associated sensor acquisition meta-data to provide a detailed characterisation of surveys carried out by the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) in the Greater Haig Fras Marine Conservazion Zone (MCZ) of the U.K in 2015.