AUV-Based Plume Tracking: A Simulation Study

Abstract EN

This paper presents a simulation study of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) navigation system operating in a GPS-denied environment.

The AUV navigation method makes use of underwater transponder positioning and requires only one transponder.

A multirate unscented Kalman filter is used to determine the AUV orientation and position by fusing high-rate sensor data and low-rate information.

The paper also proposes a gradient-based, efficient, and adaptive novel algorithm for plume boundary tracking missions.

The algorithm follows a centralized approach and it includes path optimization features based on gradient information.

The proposed algorithm is implemented in simulation on the AUV-based navigation system and successful boundary tracking results are obtained.