Integrated navigation for autonomous underwater vehicles in aquaculture: A review

Abstract

Aquaculture is the world’s fastest growing sector within the food industry, supplying humans with over half their aquatic products. Water quality monitoring or cage inspection is an indispensable part in aquaculture and is usually done manually. Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are increasingly being used in aquaculture as technology advances and the cost reduction. Autonomous navigation is considered as a basic function of AUVs but is a challenging issue primarily due to the attenuated nature of electromagnetic waves in water and unstructured underwater environments. An inertial navigation system (INS) is usually selected as the core navigation equipment for AUV navigation because it never fails to measure. This paper reviews and surveys the latest advances in integrated navigation technologies for AUVs and provides a comprehensive reference for researchers who intend to apply AUVs to autonomous monitoring of aquaculture. Pure INS has difficulty obtaining long-range precision navigation due to the inherent error accumulation of inertial sensors over time; aiding inertial navigation systems with auxiliary sensors are common means to improve the navigation accuracy of an INS for AUVs. The survey is conducted according to different assisted navigation technologies for inertial navigation. Finally, the future challenges of the AUV navigation are also presented. Keywords: Aquaculture, Underwater navigation, Autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), Inertial navigation system (INS), Integrated navigation