Navigation of Underwater Drones and Integration of Acoustic Sensing with Onboard Inertial Navigation System

The navigation of autonomous underwater vehicles is a major scientific and technological challenge. The principal difficulty is the opacity of the water media for usual types of radiation except for the acoustic waves. Thus, an acoustic transducer (array) composed of an acoustic sonar is the only tool for external measurements of the AUV attitude and position. Another difficulty is the inconstancy of the speed of propagation of acoustic waves, which depends on the temperature, salinity, and pressure. For this reason, only the data fusion of the acoustic measurements with data from other onboard inertial navigation system sensors can provide the necessary estimation quality and robustness. This review presents common approaches to underwater navigation and also one novel method of velocity measurement. The latter is an analog of the well-known Optical Flow method but based on a sequence of sonar array measurements.

Automated summary

Navigation of autonomous underwater vehicles is a significant challenge due to the opacity of water for usual types of radiation and the variability of acoustic wave propagation speed. Data fusion of acoustic measurements with other sensors is essential for improving estimation quality and robustness. New methods, such as sonar array-based analogs of Optical Flow method, are being explored to address these challenges.