Geophysical Navigation of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Using Geomagnetic Information*

This paper addresses the general problem of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle navigation by exploiting the availability of terrain and geophysics-related data. Geophysical navigation algorithms are derived to estimate the position and velocity of an AUV in the presence of unknown ocean currents and sensor biases. The current implementation merges acoustic and magnetic measurements with dead-reckoning data. One of the main contributions of the paper is the utilization of maps of invariant gradients that can be calculated from prior maps of the geomagnetic field. The results obtained through computer simulations with real data show the effectiveness of the GN approach proposed.