Localization of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles by Floating Acoustic Buoys: A Set-Membership Approach

Abstract

Abstract-This paper addresses localization of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) from acoustic time-of-flight measurements received by a field of surface floating buoys. It is assumed that measurements are corrupted by unknown-but-bounded errors, with known bounds. The localization problem is tackled in a set-membership framework and an algorithm is presented, which produces as output the set of admissible AUV positions in a three-dimensional (3-D) space. The algorithm is tailored for a shallow water situation (water depth less than 500 m), and accounts for realistic variations of the sound speed profile in sea water. The approach is validated by simulations in which uncertainty models have been obtained from field data at sea. Localization performance of the algorithm are shown comparable with those previously reported in the literature by other approaches who assume knowledge of the statistics of measurement uncertainties. Moreover, guaranteed uncertainty regions associated to nominal position estimates are provided. The proposed algorithms can be used as a viable alternative to more traditional approaches in realistic at-sea conditions.

Set-Membership Adaptive Localization Algorithm with Time-Varying Error Bounds for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

“…Authors in [12] proposed an approach which dealt with the localization of AUVs in set-membership framework. Considering the multipath effect, the discussion and implementation in this paper both referred to the shallow water case.…”

A particle filter approach for AUV localization

“…Caiti developed an acoustic localization technique, using freely floating acoustic buoys, equipped with GPS connection [6]. This system requires the buoys to emit, at regular time intervals, a ping with the coded information of its GPS position, such that the vehicle, using time-of-flight measurements of acoustic pings from each buoy can locate itself.…”

Geometric bounding techniques for underwater localization using range-only sensors

“…Bounding methods for state estimation, model parameter bounding and control problems have been developed in many papers [14,15,16,17]. Set membership techniques have previously been applied in the field of mobile robotics to obtain bounds on robot position with respect to known features, either to determine a robots configuration in a known environment, either as a batch operation on multiple observations of features [18,19], or as a observers that track bounds on the changes in robot state recursively through time [20,21,22,23,24,25,26]. Of the related work in set membership in robotics the application that is described in this paper is most closely related to that in [19], in which the position of an underwater vehicle is bounded using range measurements from multiple acoustic beacons that are mounted in floating buoys.…”