A Study on Heading and Attitude Estimation of Underwater Track Vehicle

Abstract

In this paper, we studied the designing and manufacturing of an underwater track vehicle (UTV) that can be operated in the underwater environment. We designed the electrical and control system for precise operation of the UTV and conduct test operation by using the UTV. We developed an attitude reference system (ARS) that was composed of the ring laser gyro (RLG) sensor, a geomagnetic sensor, and USBL sensor to estimate precise heading and attitude of the UTV. An inertial navigation system (INS) is developed to be combined with the developed ARS. Also, the INS navigation is configured by supplementing the USBL sensor information. We design a controller for a precise trajectory and attitude tracking by installing the ARS on the UTV. In this paper, we used an extended Kalman filter in the INS to estimate the position and attitude of the UTV. The ARS is studied to obtain more precise sensor information in an uncertain environment underwater. Performance tests of the developed INS using the UTV are conducted and the results show that the system has the best performance.

Keywords

• ring laser gyro(RLG)
• ultra-short baseline(USBL)
• Attitude reference system(ARS)
• inertial navigation system(INS)
• extended kalman filter(EKF)