Observability based control in range-only underwater vehicle localization

The needs of oceanographic research have driven the development of autonomous underwater vehicles to be capable of great feats of autonomy and endurance. It is anticipated that future autonomous oceanographic surveys will be conducted using heterogeneous teams of vehicles to reduce cost and improve data quality. In a commonly proposed scenario, measurements for a survey are collected by a group of low-cost, low-complexity vehicles while a more advanced vehicle tends to the group, providing communication and navigation assistance. The goal of this paper is to explore helming strategies for the aid vehicle to improve localization performance of dependent survey vehicles. Two methods are proposed that make use of local observability measures to decide an aid vehicle's immediate action. Survey simulations are conducted to test both methods in their ability to improve localization performance. It was found that the first developed method has comparable or better performance than an existing maximum information gain method in a lawn mower style survey mission.