Particle Filter based Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Navigation System aided thru acoustic communication ranging

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are platforms suitable for a wide variety of applications in the marine environment with economic and operational advantages. In these applications an AUV performs a given task as a mission. During the mission execution, the AUV will move around the environment following paths that allow it to fulfill the mission's objectives. To achieve this, a reliable Navigation System (NS) is required. In addition to this, the current operating concept includes the deployment of multiple AUVs on a given area, thus a communication system between vehicles is also required. In the underwater environment both navigation and communication systems deals with the particular characteristics of the medium that limits the use of conventional techniques. In this work, a complete NS for an AUV is presented. The developed NS is based on an inertial navigation scheme with velocity and position aiding. The position aiding takes advantage of the communication system onboard the vehicle, which avoids the use of additional positioning systems. The fundamentals of the applied solutions are described and experimental results and implementation details are provided. Also conclusions and future works are presented.