ASBL: low-cost, small-sized AUV remote guidance method and experimental verification

Abstract

The low-cost, small-sized autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is the preferred carrier for seabed operations. As all know, the inertial navigation system (INS) error drifts over time. Three or more seafloor datum signals are required when error-correcting the INS using the long baseline (LBL). Typically, a seafloor datum has an acoustic ranging capability of 15 km. However, the positioning ability of the conventional LBL is limited and cannot play the role of remote guidance when there is only a single datum. The paper proposes the Acoustic Synthetic Baseline (ASBL) positioning technology, which can achieve target positioning through multi-frame acoustic distance estimates between the measured target and the underwater datum. Firstly, the positioning principle of the ASBL is introduced, and the error distribution is analyzed in the paper. Secondly, a small-sized AUV is used to carry out the verification on the lake test, and the result shows that the ASBL positioning technology can play a guiding role. According to the statistics of the positioning results, the detection probability of less than 5% positioning error can reach more than 83%. The ASBL technology can reduce the dependence on the number of seafloor datums that convenience and operation efficiency can improve only by a single datum.