Attitude determination of autonomous underwater vehicles based on hydromechanics

Attitude determination is an important part for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) to achieve their designed mission. This paper presents a novel attitude solution based on the hydrodynamic model. The hydrodynamic parameters can be calculated by the known hydrological parameters. Meanwhile, the pressure information of AUV's surface can be measured by the pressure sensor array. The attitude information can be solved based on the values above. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, a multi-sensor integrated system is designed. The hydrodynamic parameters are solved by the finite element method. The quaternion model and EKF are selected to estimate the attitude information. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective to improve the accuracy of the attitudes.