Linear Track Underwater Carrier SINS Correction Method Based on Hydroacoustic Single Beacon

Abstract

Precise positioning of underwater vehicles using only a single beacon for range measurement is one of the toughest challenges for underwater navigation, especially when the underwater vehicle travels along a straight path resulting in the system unobservable. In this paper, acoustic range measurements are combined with inertial navigation to determine the position of an underwater vehicle using two consecutive measurement points. The contributions of the work presented here are twofold: First, the underwater single beacon localization algorithm proposed in this paper is able to operate under a linear track, and give the solution of the method to reject multi-valuedness. Second, considering the actual work of underwater carriers, extending the strategy to any trajectory can be used. The results obtained by the algorithm are fed back to the inertial navigation system, which can suppress the continued dispersion of inertial navigation errors. The experimental results show that the proposed “Linear track underwater carrier Strapdown Inertial Navigation System (SINS) correction method based on hydroacoustic single beacon” can solve the positioning problem of underwater long-range carriers and suppress further dispersion of their inertial navigation system errors.

Keywords

• Underwater navigation
• strapdown inertial navigation system
• acoustic positioning systems
• error correction