Magnetic Navigation and Tracking of Underwater Vehicles ⋆

This paper proposes novel methods with the potential to improve the performance of navigation and tracking systems in underwater environments. The work relies on well-established methods of potential field inversion and introduces a new analytic formulation designed to stabilize the solution of the inverse problem in real-time applications. The navigation method proposed exploits the terrain information associated with geomagnetic field anomalies, without the need of a priori maps. The procedure can also be applied to track a moving vehicle based on its associated disturbance of the environmental magnetic field. We envision the integration of theses methods in terrain-aided navigation systems, simultaneous localization and mapping algorithms, and tracking applications.