Abstract
We present an underwater localization system for medium-sized Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) that leverages a broadband wireless acoustic communication system for GPS-denied underwater localization. Many current acoustic localization systems assume a single line-of-sight path and use either narrow-band signals or short-duration pings for the convenience of mitigating motion-induced Doppler at the expense of the time-of-arrival (TOA) accuracy and operational flexibility. We propose a novel acoustic localization system that utilizes the aggressive signal processing embedded in underwater acoustic communication systems to resolve multi-path and Doppler distortion and finely estimate timing information using broadband communication signals. Timing and Doppler information extracted from this process is then used to estimate biases and drift from an inertial navigation system (INS) using a Bayesian framework. To demonstrate the feasibility of the system model, co-simulations are created from the MACE10 experimental data. Our results show dramatic improvement in localization accuracy, with an error of less than 120 m achieved over the 3 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\sim$</tex-math></inline-formula> 7 km distance range from the MACE 10 experiment between an AUV and a remote beacon with an acoustic communication transmission interval of 30 seconds.
Highlights
A UTONOMOUS navigation for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) remains a major engineering challenge, primarily because GPS-based localization is not possible underwater to determine the position of the Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs)
The extended kalman filter (EKF) and particle filter (PF) simulation results show that localization in 3 to 7 km range is possible with the noise statistics of symbol timing and Doppler factor estimated from Doppler compensated decision feedback equalizer (DFE)
Position error in time - 0.5 min particle filtering achieves asymptotic optimality with increasing number of particles, the implementation is constrained by the memory size and computation power of the device running the algorithm
Summary
A UTONOMOUS navigation for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) remains a major engineering challenge, primarily because GPS-based localization is not possible underwater to determine the position of the AUV. Pose estimation without GPS or another position correction mechanism is challenging, because inertial measurement unit (IMU) measurements drift, and there is little in the way of landmarks to navigate in deep waters. In the underwater environment where radio-frequency waves are evanescent (and do not propagate beyond a skin-depth into the water), an acoustic signal from a beacon of known location can be used in a fashion similar in spirit to a GPS signal from a satellite. The propagation delay (or TOA) of an acoustic signal can be used as a distance measurement, which can correct for the time-integration error in an IMU.
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