A system approach to navigating and piloting small UUVs

A description of trade studies and analysis conducted to establish a general architecture for navigating and piloting systems for small unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) are presented. The criteria are derived from requirements to perform missions such as mine hunting, mine field mapping, submarine applications, and package placement and retrieval. In general these vehicles are small, possibly tube-launched, battery powered, and autonomous. The variety of missions necessitates a modular approach which can accommodate various levels of performance and cost. Systems studies have led to an integrated design that uses a Kalman filter to fuse data from diverse, moderate cost sensors. The need for an affordable velocity sensor that can operate at any altitude above the ocean floor led to work to establish a concept for a dual-frequency correlation sonar. The concept uses low-power technology for battery operated sensors