The Development of the Compact Size INS for Underwater Vehicle

Generally, Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are equipped with an inertial navigation system (INS) in order to understand its own absolute position in real time. Recently, the strap-down INS, which has accelerometers and optical gyros, is the mainstream. The position accuracy of it depends strongly on its size. So, in order to get more accurate position, the size of the INS becomes large. In fact, the large-size INS is needed to improve the position accuracy. It is difficult for small AUVs to be equipped with the large-size INS because they may not have enough payloads to install it. As the result, they are often equipped with an INS which is compact and less-accurate. Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) has worked to develop the high performance and compact size INS and we developed its prototype. Now the utility including to the position accuracy of the prototype has been verified using a real AUV. In the next step, we try to develop a new INS which is more compact and high performance than the prototype.