An enhanced underwater positioning system to support deepwater installations

In the offshore engineering community, deep underwater construction activities such as installation of mooring systems for oil and gas extraction require payloads such as subsea templates, Christmas trees and manifolds to be installed accurately. In this paper, we consider a recently proposed underwater positioning system (UPS) to support deepwater installations. We identify and demonstrate its shortcomings in harsh underwater acoustic channels. We then propose enhancements to UPS, and demonstrate numerically that our proposed scheme achieves significantly better localization speed, at lower communication costs while preserving the "silent" property with a relatively small underwater acoustic sensor network deployed on the seabed in typically underwater channel conditions.