An IMU and USBL-aided buoy for underwater localization

Autonomous underwater navigation remains, as of today, a challenging task. The marine environment limits the number of sensors available for precise localization, hence Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) usually rely on inertial and velocity sensors to obtain an estimate of their position either through dead reckoning or by means of more sophisticated navigation lters (such as Kalman lters and its extensions). On the other hand, acoustic localization makes possible the determination of a reliable vehicles pose estimate exploiting suitable acoustic modems; such estimate can even be integrated within the navigation lter of the vehicle in order to increase its accuracy. In this paper, the authors discuss the development and the performance of an Ultra-Short BaseLine (USBL) buoy to aid the navigation of AUVs. At first, the components and the physical realization of the buoy will be discussed; then, the procedure to compute the position of the target will be analyzed. The following part of the paper will be focused on the development of a recursive state estimation algorithm to process the measurements computed by the buoy; speci cally, Extended Kalman Filter has been adopted to deal with the nonlinearities of the sensor housed on the buoy. A validation of the measurement ltering with data obtained from experimental tests is also proposed