A toolbox of aiding techniques for the HUGIN AUV integrated inertial navigation system

Modern AUV designs must handle submerged autonomous operation for long periods of time. The state of the art solution embedded in the HUGIN AUVs is a Doppler Velocity Log (DVL) aided Inertial Navigation System (INS) that can integrate various forms of position measurement updates. In autonomous operations, position updates are only available in limited periods of time or space, thus the core velocity aided inertial navigation system must exhibit high accuracy. However, position uncertainty of a DVL aided inertial navigation system will eventually drift off, compromising either mission operation or requirements for accurate positioning of payload data. To meet the requirements for a range of military and civilian AUV applications, the HUGIN vehicles come with at flexible and powerful set of navigation techniques. Methods for position updates include GPS surface fix, DGPS-USBL, Underwater Transponder Positioning (UTP) and bathymetric terrain navigation. Based on synthetic aperture sonar technology, a potentially revolutionary accurate velocity measurement is under development. HUGIN also comes with a navigation post-processing system (NavLab), which can be applied to increase navigational integrity and maximize position accuracy.