Localization of an underwater robot with inertial sensor fusion models

With an accurate estimate of the robot pose, robots will be capable of navigating in the environment autonomously and efficiently. In this paper, sensor fusion models that incorporate gyroscope, accelerometer and ultrasound sensors are presented. The designed models utilize Extended Kalman Filter to compensate biases from those inertial measurement units and postures and poses of the robot can then be estimated. An underwater robot comprises of a DSP-based embedded system, accelerometer, gyroscope and underwater ultrasound sensors are also designed for verification of the models proposed. Experiment results show the presented approach could help to localize underwater robot with localization errors within centimeters.