Autonomous Underwater Glider Navigation with Single Seabed Beacon

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on the problem of the positioning and navigation of underwater gliders (UGs), and propose an underwater mobile vehicle positioning and navigation method based on Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) with single seabed beacon. In our proposed method, a clock balanced factor is introduced to mitigate the clock asynchronization between the beacon and the underwater mobile vehicle, which means that the strict clock synchronization between the seabed beacon and the UG is not required. Moreover, since no velocity logs are equipped on the UG, we infer the horizontal velocity using the attitude information and the depth information. The proposed positioning and navigation method results is validated by simulations and a sea trial, which exhibits a good performance.