Navigation System for MACÁBOT an Autonomous Surface Vehicles Using GPS Aided Strapdown Inertial Navigation System

In this work the design, implementation and real-time tests of a navigation system for the autonomous surface vehicle MACÁBOT is presented. This vehicle represents a versatile platform to perform several tasks in the marine environment, such as; ports maintenance, marine productive ecosystems studies and bathymetries. The navigation system is responsible for accurately determining the position, velocity and attitude of the vehicle. It represents a fundamental component to autonomously carry out any of the aforementioned tasks. In this work, the navigation system is developed based on a GPS aided strap-down inertial navigation system using an extended Kalman filter sensor fusion algorithm. In order to provide an adaptive approach to the sensor fusion algorithm tuning a fuzzy inference system is used. The navigation system was implemented as a package for the Robot Operating System, benefiting from the advantages of heterogeneity, integration and hardware abstraction. Real time tests of the MACÁBOT on a local creek were carried out, showing satisfactory performance of the navigation system in both position and velocity estimates. In addition to these tests, simulations of GPS outages were carried out with the registered data to evaluate the performance of the navigation system in such cases