One-way travel-time inverted ultra-short baseline localization for low-cost autonomous underwater vehicles

Abstract

This paper presents an acoustic localization system for small and low-cost autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). Accurate and robust localization for low-cost AUVs would lower the barrier toward multi-AUV research in river and ocean environments. However, these AUVs introduce size, power, and cost constraints that prevent the use of conventional AUV sensors and acoustic positioning systems, adding great difficulty to the problem of underwater localization. Our system uses a single acoustic transmitter placed at a reference point and is acoustically passive on the AUV, reducing cost and power use, and enabling multi-AUV localization. The AUV has an ultra-short baseline (USBL) receiver array that uses one-way travel-time (OWTT) and phased-array beamforming to calculate range, azimuth, and inclination to the transmitter, providing an instantaneous estimate of the vehicle location. This estimate is fed to a particle filter and graph-based smoothing algorithm to generate a consistent AUV trajectory. We describe the complete processing pipeline of our system, and present results based on experiments using a low-cost AUV. To the authors' knowledge, this work constitutes the first practical demonstration of the feasibility of OWTT inverted USBL navigation for AUVs.