Terrain referencing for autonomous navigation of underwater vehicles
- Resource Type
- Authors
- Sandor M. Veres; Stephen D. McPhail; Colin Morice
- Source
- OCEANS 2009-EUROPE.
- Subject
- Echo sounding
Computer science
Dead reckoning
Mobile robot
Terrain
Bathymetry
Underwater
Remotely operated underwater vehicle
Sonar
Remote sensing
- Language
A terrain aided navigation correction system has been developed for use with the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Autosub 6000. This system allows drift in dead-reckoning navigation to be estimated by matching bathymetry obsevered in multibeam echosounder (MBE) data to a reference map. The reference map consists of a single line of bathymetric data, one swath width across, spanning the operational area of a survey mission. This map is collected by Autosub prior to undertaking the survey. This paper presents a discussion of the biases in typical AUV navigational sensors and their influence on navigation on a map that is created in-mission by a submersible. Based on this discussion a filter has been implemented and has been used to analyse the navigational errors accumulated during an Autosub 6000 survey mission and computational limitations for realtime application are assessed.