Single beacon navigation: Localization and control of the MARES AUV

This paper addresses the simultaneous localization and control of an AUV using a single acoustic beacon. To determine its horizontal position, the AUV fuses distances to the single beacon with dead reckoning data, heading and longitudinal velocity. A particle filter and an extended Kalman filter are implemented and compared in terms of performances. As this is an ill-posed problem, special guidance laws are derived so that the overall horizontal positioning error remains bounded. Besides presenting the derivation of such guidance and control laws, as well as procedures to estimate the horizontal position, we also demonstrate the performance of the proposed system by means of simulation results.