Underwater vehicle localization using angular measurements of underwater acoustic sources

This paper presents a method of underwater localization for autonomous underwater vehicles. The proposed method fuses inertial sensor based localization with angular measurement of underwater acoustic sources. Inertial sensor based localization provides a basic estimation of vehicle position and attitude using dead-reckoning process. The unacceptable errors of inertial sensor based localization are corrected by using bearing information of the acoustic sources. Relative directional angles of the acoustic sources are acquired by processing acoustic signals with Bayesian update process. By acquiring reliable directional data, the proposed method can provide accurate estimation of vehicle pose. The proposed method was verified by a sea trial.