Cooperative positioning method of underwater autonomous vehicle formation based on extended Kalman filter

Abstract

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (UAVs) have shown significant potential application value in marine environmental surveillance, development, and utilization of resources. However, due to the complex underwater acoustic channel environment and the relative motion between AUVs, this may lead to heavy-tailed non-Gaussian process noise and measurement noise, leading to increased error and the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) may fail. In prior studies, we propose a multi-AUV formation hierarchical target location algorithm based on the EKF, which can realize multi-AUV self-localization and stationary target localization. The AUV formation consists of one high-precision piloting AUV and several low-precision following AUVs. The following AUVs are divided into two levels, the reference AUVs and the AUVs to be tested. According to the designed positioning period, the reference AUV receives the position parameters from a high-precision piloting AUV and transmits its own position parameters to the AUV to be measured. Then use the EKF to complete the cooperative position correction of the AUV cluster. In this paper, we will study the influence of heavy-tailed noise on this method and study the EKF based on Huber estimation to improve the antijamming capability.