USBL Positioning System Based Adaptive Kalman Filter in AUV

As an important platform for oceanographic survey, Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) have been widely applied to many fields such as the ocean research, oil and gas exploitation, fishing and military. The importance of underwater acoustic positioning become more obvious in AUV research missions, ultra short baseline (USBL) because of its lightweight and other advantages with widespread concern. The positioning accuracy of the USBL can be affected by its own or external factors, although a lot of effort has been spent on improving these weaknesses, the efficient and effective method has yet to be developed. A novel positioning system based Adaptive Kalman filter(AKF) is designed for USBL in AUV, AKF can adaptively adjust the measurement covariance matrix and the process noise covariance matrix by utilizing latest measurement data. Experimental results demonstrate that our system outperforms than simple USBL positioning in positioning accuracy.