Navigation approaches for hovering autonomous underwater vehicles

For an intelligent autonomous underwater system to interact with its environment, it needs to achieve a navigation solution as accurate as possible. Traditional dead reckoning approach can only achieve a low drift error; therefore, the position accuracy monotonically decreases with distance traveled. Approaches such as simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and sharing location information between different vehicles can improve localization accuracy. The approaches for Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) navigation and preliminary experimental and simulations results will be presented in this work.