Implementation of a Cooperative Navigation Algorithm on a Platoon of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

Abstract

Time-synchronized acoustic data transmissions can be used to calculate the relative range between underwater vehicles. Relative range, along with other information shared over the communication link, can be used for cooperative navigation. The low bandwidth and latency of the acoustic channel do not allow for a direct implementation of a standard Kalman filter for cooperative navigation. Specifically, there is insufficient bandwidth to share the data needed to accurately propagate the estimation error covariance matrix. Instead, we share only a scalar function of the main diagonal elements of the covariance matrix. We present analysis that suggests this is a reasonable approach and experimental results that demonstrate its efficacy.