Towards Under-ice Sensing using a Portable ROV

Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) have a promising future to explore the polar regions. In this paper, we present our progress on developing a self-contain inertial odometry for under-ice navigation. Firstly, a microcontroller-based hardware time synchronization for multiple devices is demonstrated. Moreover, we present a new IMU, Doppler Velocity Log (DVL) and Pressure dead-reckoning (DR) for state estimation and a robust initialization approach for underwater vehciels. Field trials have been conducted in Utqiagvik, Alaska in March 2022 to gather multi-sensor data under the sea ice. In this paper, we highlight the performance of our method by comparing to the robot_localization algorithm, a widely used open-source localization algorithm.