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Passive Positioning of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

Abstract:

Currently, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) show a high potential to work in surveillance tasks, as well as in payload delivery through rivers, lakes or seas. However, AUVs have some limitations that prevent them from fully relying on their autonomous functions. In particular, unlike unmanned aerial vehicles, AUVs do not have precise positioning mechanisms like GPS to work underwater. Although inertial navigation systems have been developed for the positioning of these vehicles, smaller and cheaper alternatives for modern micro-AUVs are still required. Furthermore, the possibility of passively detecting the location of an AUV (i.e., detecting it without emitting any additional signal) opens up new alternatives for military and defense-oriented applications with these vehicles. Thus, this work proposes a passive positioning system for underwater vehicles using the acoustic signals already emitted by the AUVs themselves. To do this, the initial challenges associated to the positioning of AUVs through trilateration techniques are analyzed, and the final proposals are evaluated in a real scenario. The results show that the method known as TDoA is easier to implement and presents a more precise positioning.