Vessel and Underwater Vehicles Cooperative Localization using Topology Factor Graphs

Abstract

Recently, The devolopment of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) have made significant progress, and AUV is widely used in marine resources exploration and underwater operations. In order to accurately perform the task, highprecision navigation and positioning technology are therefore essential. Current navigation methods rely on GPS navigation system, acoustic navigation system and inertial navigation system. However, GPS signals are affected by external environmental factors. Acoustic navigation system has the advantages of accuracy, but difficult to maintain the system recovery. Inertial navigation is not subject to interference from the environment but has accumulated errors. To address above issues, the topology factor is introduced which only considers the positional relationship between objects regardless of their shapes.