Homing an unmanned underwater vehicle equipped with a DUSBL to an unmanned surface platform: A feasibility study

The overall objective of this work is to evaluate the ability of homing and docking an unmanned underwater vehicle (Hydroid REMUS 100 UUV) to a moving unmanned surface vehicle (Wave-Adaptive Modular Surface Vehicle USV) using a Hydroid Digital Ultra-Short Baseline (DUSBL) acoustic positioning system (APS), as a primary navigation source. An understanding of how the UUV can rendezvous with a stationary platform first is presented in this paper. Inherently, the DUSBL-APS is susceptible to error due to the physical phenomena of the underwater acoustic channel (e.g. ambient noise, attenuation and ray refraction). The development of an APS homing simulator model has allowed the authors to forecast the UUV's position and the estimated track line of the USV as determined by the DUSBL acoustic sensor. The model also provides the associated cross-track (horizontal), down-range (vertical), and along-range (projected) body-fixed errors to be expected in discrete periods of time for any sound velocity profile. In this model, focus is placed on three main elements: 1) the acoustic channel and sound ray refraction when propagating in an in-homogeneous medium; 2) the detection component of an ideal DUSBL-APS using the Neyman-Pearson criterion; 3) the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and receiver directivity impact on position estimation. The simulation tool is compared against actual open water homing results in terms of the estimated source position between the simulated and the actual USBL range and bearing information.