Globally exponentially stable filters for underwater position estimation using an array of hydroacoustic transducers on the vehicle and a single transponder

This paper presents two novel globally exponentially stable position estimators using hydroacoustic measurements from a single transponder to several transceivers on the vehicle. A comparison study of these and several existing filters is conducted with both experimental and simulated data. Two classes of filters for position estimation are compared: filters expressing the position of an underwater vehicle in the body-fixed and north-east-down coordinate frames. The comparison study showed that the latter formulation yields lower estimation errors. Furthermore, one of the novel filters developed in this paper using the north-east-down formulation is found to serve well as a compromise between performance, theoretical stability, and computational complexity relative to the near-optimal linearization-based filters with which it is compared.