A Novel and Robust Calibration Method for the Underwater Transponder Position

Abstract

This article addresses the transponder position calibration problem for the ultrashort baseline (USBL) system. Calibration is an important technique for the positioning of the USBL and the calibration of the installation error. The estimation error of the transponder position is greatly affected by the slant distance error in the traditional method. Furthermore, the calibration accuracy depends heavily on the slant distance error and it has poor robustness in the presence of outliers. Thus, a robust calibration model combining slant distance and bearings is developed, which overcomes the disadvantage of poor robustness of the traditional method. The transponder position can be estimated in real time by the adaptive fault-tolerant Kalman filter designed in this article. Some experiments are carried out to prove the superiority of the proposed algorithm. The USBL positioning accuracy is also improved with the novel calibration method.