Acoustic positioning systems. New concepts-the future

A clear definition of the applications and accuracies required to navigate AUV will have to be completed prior to defining future developments within acoustic positioning systems. This paper discusses these applications and then estimates the positioning accuracy and market size for these operations. Beyond these estimates a discussion of system development trends including inverted long baseline, inverted ultrashort baseline and system integration is detailed. Several incremental development trends are also outlined. This paper concludes that some basic research and significant system development is still required to provide the "ultimate" AUV acoustic positioning system.