Relative navigation with passive underwater acoustic sensing

Navigation in an underwater environment is challenging because global positioning system (GPS) is not available due to the rapid attenuation of electromagnetic waves in water. Acoustic baseline systems have been good alternatives to GPS for correcting dead-reckoning errors. However, their deployment and recovery generally require much effort. This paper presents an acoustic navigation approach with a single beacon in the context of graph simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithm. A stationary sound source is employed as a landmark beacon and its position is estimated using the time difference of arrival (TDOA) measurements provided by a hydrophone array. A field experiment was conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the algorithm and the results are presented.