Study on Installation Error Analysis and Calibration of Acoustic Transceiver Array Based on SINS/USBL Integrated System

The installation error of USBL acoustic transceiver array is one of the important error sources for the SINS/USBL integrated navigation system. The installation error of USBL transceiver array can be divided into coordinate shift error and angle rotation error. The angle rotation error (i.e., installation error angle) has a great influence on the positioning accuracy of USBL. In this paper, the traditional surround sailing method is used to study the relationship between the installation error angle and the USBL positioning accuracy. The influence on USBL positioning is analyzed from the component of heading, pitch, and roll of installation error angle, and the simulation results show that the horizontal positioning errors of USBL are mainly affected by the heading and rolling installation errors. The horizontal positioning error of USBL caused by heading or rolling installation error of 1° will result in 17.45 m, under the circumstance that the depth of transponder is 100 m and the radius of surround sailing is 1000 m, without considering the influence of other positioning errors. 1.75 m horizontal positioning error of USBL caused by pitching positioning error of 1° pitching positioning error and the horizontal positioning error of USBL caused by heading and pitching positioning error is also related to the horizontal distance between the transmitter and transponder. A dynamic calibration algorithm of installation error angle based on incremental iteration is proposed in this paper, which could realize the dynamic on-line estimation of installation error angle of USBL transceiver array. The installation error angle increment module can accurately estimate the installation angle error by iterating more than 10 times. In the case of ignoring the other error terms, the horizontal positioning error caused by the installation error angle can be reduced from 8 to 2 m in the positioning range of 1000 m.