Underwater Doppler Navigation with Self-calibration
This enables fully autonomous underwater navigation for platforms in unexplored areas without relying on GPS or acoustic beacons, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing IMU/DVL integration methods.
The paper tackled the challenge of precise autonomous underwater navigation by analyzing the observability of a combined IMU/DVL system, showing that DVL parameters like scale factor and misalignment angles can be self-calibrated without external sensors, with simulation results validating this conclusion.
Precise autonomous navigation remains a substantial challenge to all underwater platforms. Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) and Doppler Velocity Logs (DVL) have complementary characteristics and are promising sensors that could enable fully autonomous underwater navigation in unexplored areas without relying on additional external Global Positioning System (GPS) or acoustic beacons. This paper addresses the combined IMU/DVL navigation system from the viewpoint of observability. We show by analysis that under moderate conditions the combined system is observable. Specifically, the DVL parameters, including the scale factor and misalignment angles, can be calibrated in-situ without using external GPS or acoustic beacon sensors. Simulation results using a practical estimator validate the analytic conclusions.