Cooperative AUV Navigation Using a Single Surface Craft

Maintaining accurate localization of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is difficult because electronic signals such as GPS are highly attenuated by water making established land-based localization systems, such as GPS, useless underwater. Instead we propose an alternative approach which integrates position information of other vehicles to reduce the error and uncertainty of the on-board position estimates of the AUV. This approach uses the WHOI Acoustic Modem to exchange vehicle localization estimates — albeit at low transmission rates — while simultaneously estimating inter-vehicle range. The performance capabilities of the system were tested using Oceanserver’s Iver2 and the MIT Scout kayaks.