Underwater vehicle navigation using bearing measurements from a mobile beacon

Abstract

Autonomous underwater vehicles enable efficient underwater operations such as mapping, surveillance, and inspection. However, due to the lack of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) signals, drift in pose estimates will occur over time. Common solutions to this issue are using either stationary or mobile beacons to provide range and possibly bearing measurements to bound the navigation error over time. However, this requires occupying communication bandwidth to get reliable round-trip range measurements. In this paper, we propose a system where a mobile beacon passively listens to communications from the underwater vehicle to estimate the position of the vehicle. We show that the estimation error is bounded over time through strategic movement of the mobile beacon.

Underwater vehicle navigation using bearing measurements from a mobile beacon