Relative navigation with passive underwater acoustic sensing

Navigation in an underwater environment is challenging because global positioning system (GPS) is not available due to the rapid attenuation of electro-magnetic waves in water. Acoustic baseline systems have been good alternatives to GPS for correcting dead-reckoning errors. However, their deployment and recovery generally require much effort. This paper presents an acoustic navigation approach with a single beacon in the context of graph simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithm. A stationary sound source is employed as a landmark beacon and its position is estimated using the time difference of arrival (TDOA) measurements provided by a hydrophone array. A field experiment was conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the algorithm and the results are presented.