Guidance and Control, for Small AUVs Using DGPS and Doppler Aided Inertial Underwater Navigation

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of the Naval Postgraduate School ARIES autonomous underwater vehicle and its guidance, navigation and control performance. An attempt is made to highlight its current operational capabilities and provide a description of future enhancements for greater mission utility and flexibility. An overview of the vehicle design along with descriptions of all major hardware components and sensors is given. A major discussion of the implementation of a modular, multi-rate, multi-process software architecture for ARIES autonomous control is provided. The architecture is designed to operate using either a single computer processor or two independent, cooperating processors linked through a network interface for improved load balancing. A dual computer implementation is presented here since each processor assumes different tasks for mission operation. Also included is a section on the underwater navigation method using a real-time extended Kalman filter that fuses all sensor data and computes the real time position, orientation, velocity, etc., of the vehicle. Experimental results for navigational accuracy using a DGPS IMU Doppler aided navigation system are presented with DGPS pop-up maneuvers.