Development of a cooperative range-based underwater navigation system

Abstract

The motivation for improving underwater navigation systems arises from the need to increase the quality of the estimation of position, velocity and orientation of the vehicle. The development of an underwater navigation system is not trivial since traditional methods used for aerial, ground or water surface vehicles, that rely on satellite systems, cannot be used underwater. Therefore, a lot of e ort has been made during the last decades to develop new methodologies to locate an underwater vehicle by using acoustic positioning systems. Within these acoustic systems, underwater navigation based on single-range measurements has appeared as a less expensive solution, which is simple to calibrate, deploy and recover. However, the implementation of such navigation systems require caution when a lter to estimate the position is developed, since it su ers from observability issues under certain scenarios.