Estimating DVL Velocity in Complete Beam Measurement Outage Scenarios

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) commonly employ a Doppler velocity log (DVL) to achieve an accurate navigation solution. In real-world scenarios, like when operating in complex environments, situations of complete DVL outages may occur, leading to rapid degradation in the navigation solution. To circumvent such situations, this article proposes an approach to estimate the platform’s velocity vector based on past DVL measurements and a motion model, for short time periods. At-sea experiments were conducted using two types of AUVs, each with a different DVL, to collect data for a total time duration of 90 min. This dataset was employed to show the benefits of using the proposed approach.