On the Enhancement of an Ocean Glider Navigation System

Ocean gliders are autonomous underwater vehicles typically employed in data collection of water column properties and ocean conditions. These underwater vehicles typically cover extremely large distances at low speeds for long period missions. To facilitate global navigation satellite system fixes for the glider positioning, they must break the water surface and establish line-of-sight contact with the satellites. Breaking the sea surface is energetically expensive, exposes the glider to the disturbing force of waves altering its trajectory, and exposes it to possible sea surface hazards. Consequently, minimizing the frequency of the periodic satellite fixes would significantly enhance the glider’s efficiency and mission safety. To cope with this problem, in this paper we propose GliderNet, an end-to-end framework utilizing accelerometer readings to regress the glider depth and distance.