Cooperative navigation for multiple AUVs based on relative range measurements with a single leader

This paper deals with the cooperative navigation problem of multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV). A novel method which does not depend on a beacon network like in long baseline positioning system is proposed. The principle of this approach is to realize the cooperative localization of AUVs by using relative range measurements between the leader and the follower vehicles by means of an extended Kalman filter. Simulation results that validate the effectiveness of this approach are presented.