Sea Experiment of Positioning Underwater Mobile Vehicles Using Multiple Surface Beacons

摘要

In the paper, we present the sea experiment of positioning underwater vehicles using multiple surface beacons. A system is designed to realize the underwater vehicles' positioning using the time difference of arrivals (TDOA) technique, where no strict clock synchronization between beacons and underwater vehicles is required. Moreover, an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) method is introduced to improve the robustness. A sea experiment is conducted to verify the proposed positioning method. In the experiment, three surface beacons broadcast positioning messages synchronously at a given interval. The underwater node uses the received positioning messages and its corresponding arrival time to perform the position calculation. The experimental results show that the proposed positioning method works well and the average positioning error is less than 20 meters.