A High Accuracy Hybrid Navigation System for Unmanned Underwater Vehicle

Abstract

The development of small, light weight, low power navigation system for guidance of both tethered and autonomous Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) is required in applications such as deep salvage, oil and gas well head and pipe line laying and maintenance, etc. All have stringent position requirements in order to define target locations followings the initial find, minimize search time for return missions, as well as support of autopilot functions. In these applications mainly an accurate Sonar Doppier Velocity Log (DVL) was used for Inertial Navigation System (INS) error corrections. But the settlement of DVL is not affordable to various UUV so that not convenient to low cost and small UUV. In this paper we propose a new algorithm for combining the low cost but highly accurate INS with Water Screw Speed (WSS) of the UUV efficiently. In order to evaluate our algorithm we produced the data acquisition system and after several experimental run, we simulated this algorithm searching the error correlation time a d noise variance of these estimations. © 2003, The Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. All rights reserved.