GAS tightly coupled LBL/USBL position and velocity filter for underwater vehicles

This paper presents a novel navigation filter for estimation of linear motion quantities based on a combined Long Baseline / Ultra Short Baseline (LBL/USBL) acoustic positioning system with application to underwater vehicles. The filtering algorithm does not resort to any algebraic inversion techniques and no linearizations are carried out whatsoever. In this way, the nonlinear sensor-based system dynamics are considered to their full extent and globally asymptotically stable (GAS) error dynamics are achieved. Finally, it is shown, under simulation environment, that the filter achieves very good performance in the presence of sensor noise.