Current profile data aided positioning for autonomous underwater vehicles

The positioning problem of current profile data aided dead reckoning (DR) for autonomous underwater vehicle is addressed in this paper. Various types of instrumentations have been developed for ocean exploring, including conductivity temperature and depth (CTD), multi-beam sonar (MBS) and side scan sonar (SSS). During the measurement, the displacement which is going to be generated by DR, global position system (GPS), inertial navigation system (INS), or long baseline (LBL) must be considered seriously, because an ocean diagram measured by these sensors need this information badly. The doppler velocity log (DVL), which plays an important role in generating a reliable displacement, may be out of work sometime. In order to deal with the dropout or failure of DVL, the current track velocity measured by acoustic doppler current profilers (ADCP) is proposed to substitute for the bottom track velocity, which is going to be used by DR algorithm. The post-processing experiment demonstrates that the proposed DR position solution is not only low-cost, but also accurate.