Abstract-- This paper introduces the first publicly accessible multi-modal perception dataset for autonomous maritime navigation, focusing on in-water obstacles within the aquatic environment to enhance situational awareness for Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs). This dataset, consisting of diverse objects encountered under varying environmental conditions, aims to bridge the research gap in marine robotics by providing a multi-modal, annotated, and ego-centric perception dataset, for object detection and classification. We also show the applicability of the proposed dataset's framework using deep learning-based open-source perception algorithms that have shown success. We expect that our dataset will contribute to development of the marine autonomy pipeline and marine (field) robotics. I. INTRODUCTION A significant limitation in the research on autonomous vessels, naturally rely on multi-modal data for situational maritime navigation is the lack of relevant multi-modal awareness, which aligns with the regulations (e.g., rule 5 perception data.

Underwater navigation presents several challenges, including unstructured unknown environments, lack of reliable localization systems (e.g., GPS), and poor visibility. Furthermore, good-quality obstacle detection sensors for underwater robots are scant and costly; and many sensors like RGB-D cameras and LiDAR only work in-air. To enable reliable mapless underwater navigation despite these challenges, we propose a low-cost end-to-end navigation system, based on a monocular camera and a fixed single-beam echo-sounder, that efficiently navigates an underwater robot to waypoints while avoiding nearby obstacles. Our proposed method is based on Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), which takes as input current relative goal information, estimated depth images, echo-sounder readings, and previous executed actions, and outputs 3D robot actions in a normalized scale. End-to-end training was done in simulation, where we adopted domain randomization (varying underwater conditions and visibility) to learn a robust policy against noise and changes in visibility conditions. The experiments in simulation and real-world demonstrated that our proposed method is successful and resilient in navigating a low-cost underwater robot in unknown underwater environments.