A Cooperative Navigation Method of Multiple AUVs for Wide Seafloor Survey –First Performance Evaluation in Sea Environments–

Takumi Matsuda, Toshihiro Maki, Yoshiki Sato, Takashi Sakamaki, Tamaki Ura

Abstract


This paper reports the sea experimental results and the performance evaluation of the cooperative navigation method of multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). AUVs are divided into two groups: moving and landmark. Moving AUVs estimate their states (horizontal positions and heading angles) from their ground velocity, horizontal angular velocity, and acoustical positioning relative to a landmark AUV remaining stationary on the seafloor. A stochastic approach called a particle filter is adopted for state estimation. Each AUV can navigate with small drift over a wide area by alternating the landmark role. When AUVs exchange their landmark roles, they share their estimated states by compressing states with small communication traffic. The method is implemented in two hovering type AUVs (AUV Tri-Dog 1 and AUV Tri-TON 1). The method was evaluated in sea environments in November 2013. The AUVs succeeded in a cooperative navigation, alternately becoming the landmark. It was verified that the implemented method had the ability to perform the wide seafloor survey by only AUVs through sea experiments and post-processing simulation using the experimental results.

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