• 제어로봇시스템학회논문지
• /
• 제19권8호
• /
• pp.682-687
• /
• 2013

Navigation is a crucial capability for all types of manned or unmanned vehicles. However, vehicle navigation in underwater environments still remains a challenging problem since GPS signals for position fixes are not available in the water. Terrain-referenced underwater navigation is an alternative navigation technique that utilizes geometric information of the subsea terrain to correct drift errors due to dead-reckoning or inertial navigation. Terrain-referenced navigation requires the description of an undulating terrain surface as a mathematical function or table, which often leads to a highly nonlinear estimation problem. Recently, PFs (Particle Filters), which do not require any restrictive assumptions about the system dynamics and uncertainty distributions, have been widely used for nonlinear filtering applications. However, PF has considerable computational requirements which used to limit its applicability to problems of relatively low state dimensions. This study proposes the use of a Rao-Blackwellized particle filter that is computationally more efficient than the standard PF for terrain-referenced underwater navigation involving a moderate number of states, and its performance is compared with that of the extended Kalman filter algorithm. The validity and feasibility of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated through numerical simulations.

• 제어로봇시스템학회논문지
• /
• 제19권8호
• /
• pp.702-708
• /
• 2013

Underwater TRN (Underwater Terrain Referenced Navigation) estimates an underwater vehicle state by measuring a distance between the vehicle and undersea terrain, and comparing it with the known terrain database. TRN belongs to absolute navigation methods, which are used to compensate a drift error of dead reckoning measurements such as IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) or DVL (Doppler Velocity Log). However, underwater TRN is different to other absolute methods such as USBL (Ultra-Short Baseline) and LBL (Long Baseline), because TRN is independent of the external environment. As a magnetic-field-based navigation, TRN is a kind of geophysical navigation. This paper develops an EKF (Extended Kalman Filter) formulation for underwater TRN. A filter propagation part is composed by an inertial navigation system, and a filter update is executed with echo-sounder measurement. For large-initial-error cases, an adaptive EKF approach is also presented, to keep the filter be stable. At the end, simulation studies are given to verify the performance of the proposed TRN filter. With simplified sensor and terrain database models, the simulation results show that the underwater TRN could support conventional underwater navigation methods.