Easily Deployable Underwater Acoustic Navigation System for Multi-Vehicle Environmental Sampling Applications

Quraishi, Anwar; Bähr, Alexander; Schill, Felix; Martinoli, Alcherio

doi:10.1109/icra.2019.8793699

Cited by 6 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 14 publications

(15 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Single-beacon OWTT ranging approaches are limited in the fact that they require multiple range measurements from a variety of relative bearings in order to attain a suitably unambiguous positional fix. Alternatively, range measurements from two or more beacons can be used as a OWTT LBL positioning system, which provide a fully determined position on every broadcast via multilateration; such an approach has been demonstrated by Melo and Matos (2016) as well as more recently by Quraishi et al (2019) and also Randeni et al (2020). A variation of this approach using a OWTT, moving LBL system was very recently demonstrated by Simetti et al (2021) to support navigation for a fleet of four AUVs, each towing an 8-m-long hydrophone streamer for seismic acquisition.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Synchronous-Clock Range-Angle Relative Acoustic Navigation: A Unified Approach to Multi-AUV Localization, Command, Control, and Coordination

Rypkema

Schmidt

Fischell

2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper presents a scalable acoustic navigation approach for the unified command, control, and coordination of multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). Existing multi-AUV operations typically achieve coordination manually by programming individual vehicles on the surface via radio communications, which becomes impractical with large vehicle numbers; or they require bi-directional intervehicle acoustic communications to achieve limited coordination when submerged, with limited scalability due to the physical properties of the acoustic channel. Our approach utilizes a single, periodically broadcasting beacon acting as a navigation reference for the group of AUVs, each of which carries a chip-scale atomic clock and fixed ultrashort baseline array of acoustic receivers. One-way travel-time from synchronized clocks and time-delays between signals received by each array element allow any number of vehicles within receive distance to determine range, angle, and thus determine their relative position to the beacon. The operator can command different vehicle behaviors by selecting between broadcast signals from a predetermined set, while coordination between AUVs is achieved without intervehicle communication by defining individual vehicle behaviors within the context of the group. Vehicle behaviors are designed within a beacon-centric moving frame of reference, allowing the operator to control the absolute position of the AUV group by repositioning the navigation beacon to survey the area of interest. Multiple deployments with a fleet of three miniature, low-cost SandShark AUVs performing closed-loop acoustic navigation in real-time provide experimental results validated against a secondary long-baseline positioning system, demonstrating the capabilities and robustness of our approach with real-world data.

show abstract

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Synchronous-Clock Range-Angle Relative Acoustic Navigation: A Unified Approach to Multi-AUV Localization, Command, Control, and Coordination

Rypkema

Schmidt

Fischell

2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Single-beacon OWTT ranging approaches are limited in the fact that they require multiple range measurements from a variety of relative bearings in order to attain a suitably unambiguous positional fix. Alternatively, range measurements from two or more beacons can be used as a OWTT LBL positioning system, which provide a fully-determined position on every broadcast via multilateration; such an approach has been demonstrated by Melo and Matos (2016) as well as more recently by Quraishi et al (2019) and also Randeni et al (2020). A variation of this approach using a OWTT, moving LBL system was very recently demonstrated by Simetti et al (2021) to support navigation for a fleet of four AUVs, each towing an 8m long hydrophone streamer for seismic acquisition.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Synchronous-Clock Range-Angle Relative Acoustic Navigation: A Unified Approach to Multi-AUV Localization, Command, Control and Coordination

Rypkema,

Schmidt,

Fischell

2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper presents a scalable acoustic navigation approach for the unified command, control and coordination of multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). Existing multi-AUV operations typically achieve coordination manually, by programming individual vehicles on the surface via radio communications, which becomes impractical with large vehicle numbers; or they require bi-directional inter-vehicle acoustic communications to achieve limited coordination when submerged, with limited scalability due to the physical properties of the acoustic channel. Our approach utilizes a single, periodically-broadcasting beacon acting as a navigation reference for the group of AUVs, each of which carries a chip-scale atomic clock (CSAC) and fixed ultra-short baseline (USBL) array of acoustic receivers. One-way travel-time (OWTT) from synchronized clocks and time-delays between signals received by each array element allows any number of vehicles within receive distance to determine range, angle, and thus determine their relative position to the beacon. The operator can command different vehicle behaviors by selecting between broadcast signals from a predetermined set, while coordination between AUVs is achieved without inter-vehicle communication, by defining individual vehicle behaviors within the context of the group. Vehicle behaviors are designed within a beacon-centric moving frame of reference, allowing the operator to control the absolute position of the AUV group by re-positioning the navigation beacon to survey the area of interest. Multiple deployments with a fleet of three miniature, low-cost Sand-Shark AUVs performing closed-loop acoustic navigation in real-time provide experimental results validated against a secondary long-baseline (LBL) positioning system, demonstrating the capabilities and robustness of our approach with real-world data.

show abstract

“…In this section, we briefly describe the components of the whole system as well as subsystems on each AUV that are central to this work. For completeness, we also briefly recap relevant components from our previous work in [7].…”

Section: Relevant System Componentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver provides a position fix whenever the AUVs are on the surface. Range measurements from the acoustic subsystem are fused into the position estimate within the Kalman filter framework, as illustrated earlier in [7].…”

Section: A On-board Navigationmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

A Flexible Navigation Support System for a Team of Underwater Robots

Quraishi

Bähr²,

Schill³

et al. 2019

2019 International Symposium on Multi-Robot and Multi-Agent Systems (MRS)

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The primary and somewhat interrelated challenges affecting deployment of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are navigation and communication. We have developed miniature, agile, easy to carry and deploy AUVs equipped with a suite of sensors for underwater environmental sensing. In this paper, we propose a support system for multiple AUVs where a group of Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs) coordinate to provide external positioning reference. They transmit an acoustic ranging pulse and then broadcast their position using acoustic communication. Communication errors are detected by using a novel approach where data decoding is coupled with navigation. Our system achieves scalability in the number of AUVs by using one-way travel time for ranging and making the AUVs passive receivers. Further, it allows the ASVs to be repositioned during a mission, so that they can provide positioning aid from a closer range. This is an advantage especially in shallow water environments, where range measurement errors increase significantly with increasing distance. We describe our system in detail and evaluate it with simulations based on real data as well as field experiments.

show abstract

Easily Deployable Underwater Acoustic Navigation System for Multi-Vehicle Environmental Sampling Applications

Cited by 6 publications

References 14 publications

Synchronous-Clock Range-Angle Relative Acoustic Navigation: A Unified Approach to Multi-AUV Localization, Command, Control, and Coordination

Synchronous-Clock Range-Angle Relative Acoustic Navigation: A Unified Approach to Multi-AUV Localization, Command, Control, and Coordination

Synchronous-Clock Range-Angle Relative Acoustic Navigation: A Unified Approach to Multi-AUV Localization, Command, Control and Coordination

A Flexible Navigation Support System for a Team of Underwater Robots

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About