Abstract
Terrain-aided navigation is a potentially powerful solution for obtaining submerged position fixes for autonomous underwater vehicles. The application of terrain-aided navigation with high-accuracy inertial navigation systems has demonstrated meter-level navigation accuracy in sea trials. However, available sensors may be limited depending on the type of the mission. Such limitations, especially for low-grade navigation sensors, not only degrade the accuracy of traditional navigation systems, but further impact the ability to successfully employ terrain-aided navigation. To address this problem, a tightly-coupled navigation is presented to successfully estimate the critical sensor errors by incorporating raw sensor data directly into an augmented navigation system. Furthermore, three-dimensional distance errors are calculated, providing measurement updates through the particle filter for absolute and bounded position error. The development of the terrain aided navigation system is elaborated for a vehicle equipped with a non-inertial-grade strapdown inertial navigation system, a 4-beam Doppler Velocity Log range sensor and a sonar altimeter. Using experimental data for navigation performance evaluation in areas with different terrain characteristics, the experiment results further show that the proposed method can be successfully applied to the low-cost AUVs and significantly improves navigation performance.
Highlights
Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are becoming increasingly important for oceanographic research [1]
Travelling over two different terrains, the AUV is equipped with the multi-sensors specified in Travelling two different terrains, theobtained
In order to implement terrain-aided navigation (TAN) for low-cost AUVs, the tightly-coupled TAN is proposed for modifications which must be applied to the navigation equations in order to take account of the modifications which must be applied to the navigation equations in order to take account of the large errors of low-cost AUVs, and the performance of the proposed method on the TAN is illustrated large errors of low-cost AUVs, and the performance of the proposed method on the TAN is in this paper
Summary
Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are becoming increasingly important for oceanographic research [1]. AUV missions usually start from the surface where the vehicle can obtain a valid global positioning system (GPS) fix [5]. In spite of the continuous and autonomous navigation information, INS alone accumulates unacceptable position and velocity drift over relatively short periods of time. Various combinations of an INS and sufficient external aid have become popular solutions for most AUV navigation systems [7,8,9,10]. Current research is looking into finding further sources of aiding information to either improve navigation robustness or reduce the cost of AUV systems [14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21]. This paper concentrates on the subject of Sensors 2017, 17, 680; doi:10.3390/s17040680 www.mdpi.com/journal/sensors
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