Extended Range AUV Localization and Navigation Aided by Gravity Anomalies and Bathymetry

Localization and navigation of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) is critical to underwater operations as measurements collected by their sensors are of little value if they are not geo-referenced to an acceptable certainty. This paper presents contributions to address these challenges for long endurance AUV missions. First, is a flexible high fidelity underwater navigation testbed to verify navigation and localization strategies. Second, a navigation algorithm that builds on state-of-the-art underwater inertial navigation aided by prior gravity anomaly maps. The algorithm is verified in the underwater navigation testbed. The presented case shows that the proposed algorithm can decrease localization error by 75%.