DVL-based Autonomous Navigation Method for Unmanned Undersea Vehicles

Abstract

In response to the requirement for autonomous navigation capability of unmanned undersea vehicles, a dead-reckoning navigation system composed of a Doppler velocity log(DVL), a pressure sensor, an electronic compass(ECP), and a low-cost inertial measurement unit(IMU) is designed in this study, and a DVL-based autonomous navigation method is developed. In the proposed method, a sensor integration scheme is implemented to overcome the installation error and time asynchrony. An ECP/IMU fusion scheme is developed for high-frequency attitude parameters. On this basis, the strategies for the elimination of DVL abnormal data, the correction of DVL high dynamic errors and the assistance of global navigation satellite system are formulated. The proposed method is applied on the “Haiwei 1” autonomous undersea vehicle(AUV). The filed experiments of “Haiwei 1” AUV indicate that the positioning accuracy of the autonomous navigation corresponds to approximately 1.5%(circular error probable) of the distance traveled, which can serve as a reference for related researches and applications.

Keywords

• unmanned undersea vehicle
• autonomous navigation
• dead-reckoning
• dvl-based navigation