Preliminary Results on Cooperative Operation of ASV-AUV using Acoustic based Relative Localization*

Multiple autonomous marine vehicles can be used for complementary cooperative operation to perform given marine tasks. This paper presents a method of cooperative positioning system for ASV-AUV. ASVs can perform accurate localization based on GNSS. On the other hand, AUVs suffer from lack of absolute localization and the accumulation of inertial sensor based localization error. The proposed method is developed to perform reliable localization of both ASV and AUV by cooperative localization system. The proposed cooperative positioning system utilizes relative geometric information between vehicles acquired by acoustic sensors. AUV can correct its own location by using the relative geometric information. The proposed method is implemented by Kalman filter based estimation for the cooperation of single ASV and single AUV case. Simulation results verify the performance of the proposed cooperative location method.