Improvement on an inertial-Doppler navigation system of underwater vehicles using a complementary range sonar

Abstract

This work presents an improvement of an inertial-Doppler underwater navigation system for unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV) using a complementary range sonar. The inertial-Doppler navigation system is generally based on an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and a Doppler velocity log (DVL) accompanying a magnetic compass and a depth sensor. Although conventional navigation systems update bias errors of the inertial sensors, scale effects of the DVL, the estimated position slowly drifts as time passes. This paper proposes a measurement model with additional range sonar to improve the performance of the IMU-DVL navigation system for underwater vehicles. The proposed navigation model based on inertial navigation systems includes the scale effects, the bias errors of the DVL, and the error model of the range sonar, where the order of the system states is 21. An extended Kalman filter was adopted to propagate the error covariance, updated the measurement errors and correct the state equation when the external measurements are available. Simulation conducted with the 6-d.o.f. equations of motion of an AUV in lawn-mowing survey mode illustrates the effectiveness of the IMU-DVL navigation system assisted by the additional range measurement.