Acoustic AUV Navigation Referring to the Position of a Surface Station With Acoustic Data Transmission

In this paper, a navigation method of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is proposed. In the method, the continuous acoustic signal is transmitted from a surface station to the AUV. The acoustic signal includes information of the position and the velocity of the surface station measured by the global positioning system (GPS). The AUV receives the acoustic signal with receiver array equipped on the top surface of the body, and obtain the included information and perform the inverted ultra short baseline (IUSBL) computation using the same acoustic signal. Using the depth data by a depth sensor, the AUV is not needed to transmit any acoustic signal to measure the round-trip time of the acoustical propagation. The output of the inertial navigation system (INS) equipped on the AUV, the IUSBL result, and the transmitted information are integrated for the navigation of AUV. A simulation result was shown. The depth of the AUV was 3000 meters. In the simulation the used sensors had the typical error source respectively. The initial positional error of the INS output was about 100 meters. As the result, the error was converged within about 100 seconds and finally the error was around 1 meter. In this method the large random error of the acoustic navigation is rapidly converged because the output rate of the acoustic navigation is very fast.