A survey on Terrain Based Navigation for AUVs

Terrain Based Navigation (TBN) is a method rooted to the early cruise missile navigation systems, when GPS was not yet available. For decades, TBN has been applied as a complementary system to INS navigation for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). In the field of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), it has the potential to bound the drift inherent to dead reckoning navigation, based on INS and/or Doppler Velocity Log (DVL) sensors, as well as to make the navigation beyond the areas of coverture of the acoustic transponder networks, a reality. This paper overviews the main concepts related to TBN and present an exhaustive survey of the works reported in the literature. As a main contribution, a table comparing the motion and the measurement models, as well as the probabilistic framework used for the estimation is reported. An effort has been put on unifying the diverse nomenclature used across the surveyed works. We aim this paper to become an starting point for the researchers interested in this technology, with pointers to the most interested works in the area.