Magnetic Navigation and Tracking of Underwater Vehicles

This paper proposes novel methods with the potential to improve the performance of navigation and tracking systems in underwater environments. The work relies on well-established methods of potential field inversion and introduces a new analytic formulation designed to stabilize the solution of the inverse problem in real-time applications. The navigation method proposed exploits the terrain information associated with geomagnetic field anomalies, without the need of a priori maps. The procedure can also be applied to track a moving vehicle based on its associated disturbance of the environmental magnetic field. We envision the integration of theses methods in terrain-aided navigation systems, simultaneous localization and mapping algorithms, and tracking applications.