Title: Cooperative navigation for multiple autonomous underwater vehicles using a single leader

Authors: Miao Zhang; Lan Zheng; Lei Jiao

Addresses: College of Mechanical Engineering, Wenzhou University, Wenzhou, 325035, China ' No. 1 Oil Production Company, Henan Oilfield, BuJiang, 474780, Tongbai, China ' No. 1 Oil Production Company, Henan Oilfield, BuJiang, 474780, Tongbai, China

Abstract: This paper studies the cooperative navigation problem for a group of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). The relative positioning problem is solvable when dead-reckoning data is combined with relative range data through an acoustic communication network between the leader and the follower vehicles. An extended Kalman filter is then designed to estimate the position of the follower vehicles. Finally, cooperative navigation results and a comparison with dead-reckoning navigation are presented from numerical simulations.

Keywords: autonomous underwater vehicles; multiple AUVs; cooperative navigation; relative positioning; extended Kalman filter; EKF; single leader; relative positioning; dead-reckoning data; relative range data; acoustic communication networks; numerical simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMSI.2013.055115

International Journal of Materials and Structural Integrity, 2013 Vol.7 No.1/2/3, pp.182 - 190

Published online: 12 Jul 2014 *

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