A Hybrid IMM Based INS/DVL Integration Solution for Underwater Vehicles

Abstract

To enhance the performance of the navigation system under the complex underwater environment, a hybrid interacting multiple model (HIMM) aided inertial navigation system (INS)/Doppler velocity logs (DVL) integration solution is proposed. First, to employ the acoustic Doppler current profiler mode of DVL, a novel INS/DVL mechanism is constructed where the water current velocity is estimated in real time and both bottom-track and water-track velocity measurements of DVL are involved in the observation vector. Meanwhile, to deal with the outliers and observation noises in the DVL's measurements, a HIMM algorithm is proposed to adaptively select the proper models to describe the changing environment. Simulations and field test are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, where the interacting multiple model (IMM) algorithm is employed for comparison. The results indicate that the proposed HIMM-aided INS/DVL integration solution shows superiority than the traditional IMM method when the observation noises and outliers exist. Meanwhile, the proposed integration scheme can successfully bridge the DVL's bottom-track outages.