An Auxiliary Navigation System for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

It is desirable to have an auxiliary navigation system on-board an autonomous underwater vehicle to increase the reliability of its navigation when it works within an underwater structure. An inertial navigation system has been analyzed for this purpose. It shows an unacceptable positioning error due to the low accuracy of a practical stable platform. A simple gyrocompass with an appropriate algorithm has been proposed as an auxiliary navigation system. A flow chart of the proposed algorithm is given in this paper.