VEHICLE DYNAMICS AIDING TECHNIQUE FOR USBL/INS UNDERWATER NAVIGATION SYSTEM

This paper presents a Vehicle Dynamics (VD) aiding technique to enhance position, velocity, and attitude error estimation in low-cost Inertial Navigation Systems (INS), with application to Underwater Vehicles (UV). The VD model is directly embedded in an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) and provides specific information about the rigid body tridimensional motion unavailable from the INS computations, thus allowing for a comprehensive improvement of the overall navigation system performance. A tightly-coupled inverted USBL is also adopted to enhance position and attitude estimation using range measurements to transponders in the vehicle's mission area. The overall Navigation System accuracy improvement is assessed in simulation using a nonlinear model of the Infante UV.