Advances in single-beacon one-way-travel-time acoustic navigation for underwater vehicles

Summary

Sarah E. Webster, Ryan M. Eustice, Hanumant Singh and Louis L. Whitcomb, Advances in single-beacon one-way-travel-time acoustic navigation for underwater vehicles. International Journal of Robotics Research, 31(8):935-950, 2012.

Abstract

This paper reports the formulation and evaluation of a centralized extended Kalman filter designed for a novel navigation system for underwater vehicles. The navigation system employs Doppler sonar, depth sensors, synchronous clocks, and acoustic modems to achieve simultaneous acoustic communication and navigation. The use of a single moving reference beacon eliminates the requirement for the underwater vehicle to remain in a bounded navigable area; the use of underwater modems and synchronous clocks enables range measurements based on one-way time-of-flight information from acoustic data-packet broadcasts. The acoustic data packets are broadcast from a single, moving reference beacon and can be received simultaneously by multiple vehicles within acoustic range. We report results from a simulated deep-water survey and real field data collected from an autonomous underwater vehicle survey in 4000 m of water on the southern Mid-Atlantic Ridge with an independent long-baseline navigation system for ground truth.

Bibtex entry