Tightly Coupled INS/APS Passive Single Beacon Navigation

Abstract

Unlike aerial or terrestrial navigation, the Global Navigation satellite system (GNSS) is not available underwater. This is a big challenge for underwater navigation. The inertial navigation system (INS) aided by the single-beacon acoustic positioning system (APS) provides one solution, but the long-range case is limited by low SNR conditions. Inspired by passive synthetic aperture detection, we proposed a new tightly coupled navigation algorithm based on spatial synthesis and one-way-travel-time (OWTT) range measurement. We design two estimators: the DOA/Range estimator using the model-based method and the tightly coupled INS/APS navigation estimator. Based on the improved UKF, all information is combined. Simulation is carried out in MATLAB. Compared with range-only tightly coupled INS/APS navigation, synthetic long baseline (SLBL) algorithm and Doppler velocity logger (DVL) aided centralized extended Kalman filter (CEKF) based single beacon INS/OWTT navigation, the proposed method's performance is proven. The main contributions of this work are: 1. Propose a new architecture of underwater integrated navigation; 2. Apply the passive acoustic detecting method in the navigation to improve accuracy. 3. Apply the tightly coupled method to improve availability.

Underwater inertial error rectification with limited acoustic observations

“…Unlike aerial and land navigation, the Global Satellite Navigation Systems (GNSS) is unavailable underwater due to its poor penetration capability (Yang, 2018). Typical underwater positioning and navigation techniques include Inertial/Dead Reckoning Navigation System (INS/DRNS) (El-Sheimy & Youssef, 2020;Paull et al, 2014), Acoustic Positioning Systems (APS) (Qin et al, 2022;Tang et al, 2023;Zou et al, 2023), and Geophysical Matching Aided Navigation (GMAN) using gravity, terrain, and magnetic (Wang et al, 2023;Zhang et al, 2022), and etc.. However, an individual positioning and navigation method is often insufficient to meet the demands of underwater PNT for the activities such as ocean exploration, monitoring, and military operations (Yang & Qin, 2021), particularly for the long-duration and long-distance underwater missions (Xu, 2017).…”

“…Underwater positioning commonly utilizes inertialacoustic integrated navigation, which combines Inertial Navigation System (INS) and APS (Claus et al, 2018;Liu et al, 2021;Masmitja et al, 2019;Wang et al, 2022aWang et al, , 2022bZou et al, 2023). Inertial navigation provides selfsufficiency, concealment, and all-around output with a high rate, but it is prone to accumulating errors over time, which needs external position correction periodically.…”