Testing and evaluation of the Small Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Navigation System (SANS)

Abstract

At the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), a small AUV navigation system (SANS) was developed for research in support of shallow-water mine countermeasures and coastal environmental monitoring The objective of this thesis is to test and evaluate the SANS performance after tuning the filter gains through a series of testing procedures. The new version of SANS (SANS III) used new hardware components which were smaller, cheaper, and more reliable. A PC/l O4 computer provided more computing power and, increased the reliability and compatibility of the system. Implementing an asynchronous Kalman filter in the position and velocity estimation part of the navigation subsystem improved the navigation accuracy significantly. To determine and evaluate the overall system performance, ground vehicle testing was conducted. Test results showed that the SANS III was able to navigate within + 15 feet of Global Positioning track with no Global Positioning update for three minutes.