A novel backtracking navigation scheme for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

A high quality Inertial Navigation System (INS) combined with a Doppler Velocity Log (DVL) is a common approach for Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) navigation. In this paper, a novel backtracking navigation scheme is employed. In the case of only when an initial position and the velocity of DVL are available, a precise current position can be obtained when finishing the backtracking. Therefore, AUV can be launched without waiting for the completeness of the alignment. In addition, a newly derived INS error model is employed to reduce the volume of the data that has to be recorded for the backtracking and to estimate the INS biases. With the proposed method, INS/DVL integration is able to reach the accuracy of within 0.3% of the distance travelled.