An Underwater Acoustic Network Positioning Method Based on Spatial-Temporal Self-Calibration

Abstract

The emergence of underwater acoustic networks has greatly improved the potential capabilities of marine environment detection. In underwater acoustic network applications, node location is a basic and important task, and node location information is the guarantee for the completion of various underwater tasks. Most of the current underwater positioning models do not consider the influence of the uneven underwater medium or the uncertainty of the position of the network beacon modem, which will reduce the accuracy of the positioning results. This paper proposes an underwater acoustic network positioning method based on spatial-temporal self-calibration. This method can automatically calibrate the space position of the beacon modem using only the GPS position and depth sensor information obtained in real-time. Under the asynchronous system, the influence of the inhomogeneity of the underwater medium is analyzed, and the unscented Kalman algorithm is used to estimate the position of underwater mobile nodes. Finally, the effectiveness of this method is verified by simulation and sea trials.

Keywords

• beacon node drift
• spatial-temporal self-calibration
• networked positioning
• underwater acoustic networks