Globally exponentially stable single beacon underwater navigation with unknown sound velocity estimation

Abstract

Single beacon navigation methods with unknown effective sound velocity (ESV) have recently been proposed to solve the performance degeneration induced by ESV setting error. In these methods, a local linearization-based state estimator, which only exhibits local convergence, is adopted to estimate the navigation state. When the initial ESV setting error or vehicle initial position error is large, the local linearization-based state estimators have difficulty guaranteeing the filtering convergence. With this background, this paper proposes a linear time-varying single beacon navigation model with an unknown ESV that can realize global convergence under the condition of system observability. A Kalman filter is adopted to estimate the model state, and the corresponding stochastic model is inferred for the application of the Kalman filter. Numerical simulation confirms that the proposed linear time-varying single beacon navigation model can realize fast convergence in the case of a large initial error, and has superior steady-state performance compared with the existing methods.