An Origin State Method for Lossy Synchronous-clock Acoustic Navigation

Abstract

This paper examines the problem of localizing a network of underwater vehicles using inter-vehicle range observations derived from measuring the one-way-travel-time (OWTT) of acoustic broadcasts. We report the derivation of the novel origin state method; an algorithm for distributing a local pose-graph as a sequence of minimal bandwidth information packets that is robust to packet loss. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this algorithm as an extension of the decentralized extended information filter (DEIF) for synchronous-clock acoustic navigation through post-process implementation using a real-world data set.

An origin state method for communication constrained cooperative localization with robustness to packet loss

“…Our work is closest to Webster et al (2013), Bailey et al (2011), and Walls and Eustice (2012) in its effort to distribute local data fusion in an optimal way and to leverage the sparsity of the Gaussian information form to compactly broadcast this information. We build upon the previously reported approach in Walls and Eustice (2012) by (i) improving network scalability via a passive origin shifting scheme that eliminates the need for client-side acknowledgments, (ii) introducing a recovery packet mechanism that enables clients to enter and leave the network or recover after a long period of communication dropout, and (iii) presenting several AUV trials demonstrating our algorithm's ability for real-time underwater navigation.…”

“…In practice, both of these methods are not realizable in the underwater scenario because they require a non-faulty communication channel. We previously reported (Walls and Eustice, 2012) a preliminary method toward alleviating the non-faulty communication constraint in distributing local server information, but which still relied upon a client acknowledgment scheme-limiting scalability to multiple clients.…”

An Exact Decentralized Cooperative Navigation Algorithm for Acoustically Networked Underwater Vehicles with Robustness to Faulty Communication: Theory and Experiment

“…In this paper we (i) build upon the previously reported approach in [26] by improving network scalability via a passive origin shifting scheme that eliminates the need for acknowledgments, (ii) introduce a recovery packet mechanism that enables clients to enter and leave the network or recover after a long period of communication dropout, and (iii) present full-scale comparative AUV trials demonstrating our algorithm's ability for real-time underwater navigation.…”

“…In practice, both of these methods are not realizable in the underwater scenario because they require a non-faulty communication channel. We previously reported [26] a preliminary method toward alleviating the nonfaulty communication constraint in distributing local server information that relied upon a client acknowledgment scheme.…”

“…An origin shifting scheme based on acknowledgments from each client was previously proposed in [26]; however, an acknowledgment based scheme does not scale well to many clients, and also nullifies several benefits of OWTT-based relative ranging. Moreover, numerical instability will continue to plague the system if the server does not regularly receive acknowledgments.…”