Globally Exponentially Stable Aided Inertial Navigation with hydroacoustic Measurements from A Single Transponder

Abstract

This paper provides a novel formulation relating underwater range measurements to body-fixed position when several acoustic transceivers are mounted on the vehicle and only one transponder is placed in the vehicle's surroundings. This formulation is used in a novel three-stage filter for aided inertial navigation that has both global convergence and near-optimal performance w.r.t. variance of the estimate. It estimates both the position and velocity of the vehicle, and relies on a globally stable attitude observer to provide estimates of the attitude and angular rate sensor bias. Two different formulations of the novel three-stage filter were tested in simulations and shown to track the true position.