Navigation filters for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles during geotechnical surveying experiments

This paper describes two navigation filters designed for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) for geotechnical surveying. Both a Luenberger observer for a kinematic model of the vehicle as well as an extended Kalman filter for its dynamic model are addressed. The filters allow to fuse information coming from a Global Positioning System (GPS), a compass, a gyro, a depth meter, and acoustic based range measurements. A thruster model mapping low level actuator commands to vehicle surge velocity is also exploited in the design. The performances of both filters have been compared using the experimental data collected during the H2020 WiMUST (Widely scalable Mobile Underwater Sonar Technology) project experiments.