Acoustic Guidance for Gavia Inertial Navigation System

Several options exist for acoustically aiding the Gavia AUV navigation system. Currently a Teledyne Benthos LBL and DAT systems are in the process of being integrated on to the AUV. The currently available PinPoint LBL system from LinkQuest has been used to improve positional accuracy of the Gavia Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) navigation system. A separate Kalman filter is used to estimate the AUV position using the position from the inertial system as an a priori estimate. Feeding the acoustically obtained position back into the inertial navigation system improves the overall performance of the system. This method is robust for failures in range measurements.