On the use of Doppler-shift estimation for simultaneous underwater acoustic localization and communication

Abstract

Due to the relative low propagation speed of acoustic waves in underwater medium, Underwater Acoustic (UWA) communication is severely impacted by Doppler shift effect especially as the transmission link is related to a system in motion like an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). Usually, motioninduced Doppler-shift needs to be estimated and compensated at the UWA receiver side in order to retrieve data. This estimation also provides an information on transmitter/receiver relative speed that is valuable for an underwater mobile like an AUV to perform underwater localization and navigation. In this paper, we consider a reference anchor transmitting UWA data to an AUV in operation. The latter uses UWA communication decoding process to estimate both range and relative speed with respect to the reference point in order to improve its navigation via a conventional Kalman filtering. Simulation results on a shallow water channel demonstrate the Doppler shift estimation to provide substantial enhancement of the underwater localization with respect to a range-only approach.

Simultaneous underwater acoustic localization and communication: an experimental study

“…This paper extends the work of [11] by introducing both range and velocity estimation into the localization method and we further run controlled environment experiments, e.g., in the water pool, to study its performance. Therefore, the proposed localization system integrates a a Range-Only Single Beacon (ROSB) localization method and a Doppler velocity estimation given by the communication system.…”

“…Data is transmitted by using the same signal as in [11]. Each frame is formed by 150 pilot symbols used for UWA channel estimation and 2518 Binary Phase Shift Keying (BPSK) data symbols carrying the information.…”

“…The command in acceleration and heading angle used in the feedback linearization method were not taken into account in the filter as opposed to what is done in [11], since we want to focus on speed and range measurements being fed to the estimator. Furthermore, if the measurement is speed-only the two first lines of (8) are equal to 0.…”

Sea experimentation of single beacon simultaneous localization and communication for AUV navigation

“…In this paper, we are developing a new localization method previously introduced in [2] and [3]. The scientific community has researched on stable AUV localization techniques, leading to several innovative technologies in this domain, described in [4] and [5].…”

“…Papers [2] and [3] are previous work of respectively simulation and pool-test of this novel technique. We then spread out our work on this subject by making an experimentation on short mission trajectories in a real sea environment to examine its performance.…”