Enhancement of the Aided Inertial Navigation System for an AUV via micronavigation

It is often crucial in most of today´s Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) missions that the vehicle position be known precisely. Navigation performance of an Aided Inertial Navigation System (AINS) is always limited by the accuracy of sensors. In this paper we focus on enhancing performance of the AINS via micronavigation, which exploits a so-called Displaced Phase Center Antenna (DPCA) technique. The method is tested on an AUV Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) test platform and the experimental results validate the effectiveness of the approach developed. Effect of the bottom fluctuations on the micronavigation performance is also studied.