Cooperative navigation and control for surface-underwater autonomous marine vehicles

With the fast development of unmanned platform and artificial intelligent, there has been an increasing interest in using Autonomous Marine Vehicles (AMVs) for more marine services of increasing complexity and long-endurance. As there is a limitation for single AMV executing marine task in efficiency and accuracy, the cooperation of multi-AMVs becomes an important trend in unmanned marine systems. One of the key technologies of multi-AMVs is the cooperative navigation and control, while it may suffer from the problem of network complexity, communication delay, and algorithms development, etc. To address the challenge, a cooperative navigation and control method for surface-underwater AMVs is proposed to improve the performance of marine operations. First, in order to improve the navigation and control performance of the AMVs on the surface of the water and underwater, acoustic communication and positioning system is used to establish the surface-underwater communication network. Then, to improve the navigation performance of the single AUV, a novel cooperative navigation algorithm for is proposed. Experimental results show that our proposed cooperative navigation and control method can obtain more accuracy solutions in terms of position and trajectory tracking result of AUV, when compared with the AUV using an existed INS. Also, the navigation and control system proves to be effective for the USV dynamically tracking the AUV with a stable relative distance and orientation.