A Novel Approach for Underwater Vehicle Localization and Communication Based on Laser Reflection

Abstract

This study presents a device for tracking, locating and communicating underwater vehicles as they work near the seabed. The system includes a base station placed on the seabed and a reflective module mounted on a hybrid underwater profiler (HUP). The base station localizes and communicates with the HUP working near the seabed based on laser reflections of corner cube retroreflectors. A tracking method based on the particle filter algorithm is then presented. Localization is performed using the least-squares method with refraction compensation. Lost tracking links are retrieved via a recovering approach based on the interpolation method. Finally, a communication method using a modulating retroreflector installed on the reflection module is proposed. The proposed tracking, localization, and communication approach provides higher localization accuracy with lower power consumption at low cost compared with the commonly used acoustic methods. The effectiveness of the proposed approach was clarified via tracking, localization, and communication experiments.

Underwater target passive acoustic localization method based on Hanbury Brown–Twiss interference

“…At sea, owing to the complexity of the marine environment, underwater positioning encounters significant difficulties and challenges (Zhang et al , 2020; Ali et al , 2021), which have prompted the emergence of a growing number of localization methods. Conventional localization methods use electromagnetic or optical waves to determine the target position and are gradually being applied underwater (Park et al , 2015; Duecker et al , 2017; Munasinghe et al , 2017; Saeed et al , 2018; Wu et al , 2019). However, such waves are heavily attenuated in water and cannot penetrate the surface of the ocean; therefore, their use in underwater information transmission is challenging.…”