Underwater vehicle positioning based on time of arrival measurements from a single beacon

This paper describes an undersea navigation augmentation system that is used to remove the accumulated position errors in an undersea platform navigation system. The system consist of a single offboard beacon and algorithms added to the platform onboard computer system that control the beacon operation, detect and time tag the beacon ping signals on a single hydrophone, and using these detections along with onboard heading and speed in water measurements localize the position of the platform relative to the beacon. The localization can be in geodetic coordinates if the beacon position is known or a relative measure for repeated operations in an area. After describing the system the algorithms are evaluated in a numerical simulation.