Precision Hybrid Navigation System for Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUV’s)

Bill San Filipo, Walter Goetz

Abstract:	A need has developed for a small, light weight, low power navigation system for guidance of Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUV’s) (both tethered and autonomous) used in applications such as deep salvage, oil and gas well head and pipeline laying and maintenance, sea bed mining, communications cable laying and maintenance, and scientific surveys. All have stringent positioning requirements in order to define target locations following the initial find, minimize search time for return missions, as well as support of autopilot functions (attitude and/or heading control). Missions for these may last many hours or even several days in duration, and may reach depths exceeding 5 km, precluding dependence on sonar transponder/baseline receiver array schemes for vehicle positioning. By combining a low-cost but accurate Inertial Navigation System (INS), a GPS receiver for surface pre-mission INS alignment, and an accurate sonar Doppler Velocity Log (DVL) for an underwater reference, with a sophisticated Kalman filter to combine these data in an optimal way, underwater navigation meeting these objectives can be achieved, with long term sea bottom position error growth rate of only a few meters per hour.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 10th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS 1997) September 16 - 19, 1997 Kansas City, MO
Pages:	953 - 961
Cite this article:	Filipo, Bill San, Goetz, Walter, "Precision Hybrid Navigation System for Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUV’s)," Proceedings of the 10th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS 1997), Kansas City, MO, September 1997, pp. 953-961.
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