Low Cost Navigator (LOCONAV)

The US Department of the Navy (DoN) is developing a low cost, one-time deployable, autonomous undersea vehicle (AUV) that crawls along the ocean floor burying a hydrophone array. As these are fire and forget type deployments, it is important that the vehicle lay the array in a desired shape or let the array processing system know the shape of the array. Effective deployment of these assets require highly accurate navigational capabilities, but current high accuracy underwater navigation techniques have size, weight, power consumption, and cost (SWAP-C) requirements that exceed platform limits. To enable high accuracy navigation on small AUVs, we propose Low Cost Navigator (LOCONAV). LOCONAV uses a novel hierarchical particle filter to combine noisy measurements from multiple Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) and direct observations of platform state from secondary sensors, including speed sensors, compasses, and inclinometers. This approach allows LOCONAV to model complex uncertainties from a variety of sensors while leveraging the strengths of each sensor to maintain an accurate estimate of AUV geolocation and orientation. During Phase I, we will identify promising low-SWAP-C sensors through a trade study, and build a functional LOCONAV system with software components to demonstrate the feasibility of the LOCONAV system through virtual and real data feed testing.