This paper describes an alignment algorithm that estimates the initial heading angle of AUVs (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) for starting navigation in a sea area. In the basic dead reckoning system, the initial orientation of the vehicle is very important. In particular, the initial heading value is an essential factor in determining the performance of the entire navigation system. However, the heading angle of AUVs cannot be measured accurately because the DCS (Digital Compass) corrupted by surrounding magnetic field in pointing true north direction of the absolute global coordinate system (not the same to magnetic north direction). Therefore, we constructed an experimental constraint and designed an algorithm based on extended Kalman filter using only inertial navigation sensors and a GPS (Global Positioning System) receiver basically. The value of sensor covariance was selected by comparing the navigation results with the reference data. The proposed filter estimates the initial heading angle of AUVs for navigation in a sea area and reflects sampling characteristics of each sensor. Finally, we verify the performance of the filter through experiments.

This paper proposes a sensor-fusion technique where rho data sets for the previous moments are properly transformed and fused into the current data sets to enable accurate measurement, such as, distance to an obstacle and location of the service robot itself. In the conventional fusion schemes, the measurement is dependent only on the current data sets. As the results, more of sensors are required to measure a certain physical promoter or to improve the accuracy of the measurement. However, in this approach, intend of adding more sensors to the system, the temporal sequence of the data sets are stored and utilized for the measurement improvement. Theoretical basis is illustrated by examples md the effectiveness is proved through the simulation. Finally, the new space and time sensor fusion (STSF) scheme is applied to the control of a mobile robot in the indoor environment and the performance was demonstrated by the real experiments.