Acoustic based localization is essential to operate autonomous robotic systems in underwater environment where the use of sensorial data is limited. This paper proposes a localization method using artificial underwater acoustic sources. The proposed method acquires directional angles of acoustic sources using time difference of arrivals of two hydrophones. For this purpose, a probabilistic approach is used for accurate estimation of the time delay. Then, Gaussian sum filter based SLAM technique is used to localize both acoustic sources and underwater vehicle. It is performed by using bearing of acoustic sources as measurement and inertial sensors as prediction model. The proposed method can handle directional ambiguity of time difference based source localization by generating Gaussian models corresponding to possible locations of both front and back sides. Through these processes, the proposed method can provide reliable localization method for underwater vehicles without any prior information of source locations. The performance of the proposed method is verified by experimental results conducted in a real sea environment.

For the underwater localization, acoustic sensor systems are widely used due to greater penetration properties of acoustic signals in underwater environments. On the other hand, the good penetration property causes multipath and interference effects in structured environment too. To overcome this demerit, a localization method using the attenuation of electro-magnetic(EM) waves was proposed in several literatures, in which distance estimation and 2D-localization experiments show remarkable results. However, in 3D-localization application, the estimation difficulties increase due to the nonuniform (doughnut like) radiation pattern of an omni-directional antenna related to the depth direction. For solving this problem, we added a depth sensor for improving underwater 3D-localization with the EM wave method. A micro scale pressure sensor is located in the mobile node antenna, and the depth data from the pressure sensor is calibrated by the curve fitting algorithm. We adapted the depth(z) data to 3D EM wave pattern model for the error reduction of the localization. Finally, some experiments were executed for 3D localization with the fast calculation and less errors.

This paper proposes an underwater localization algorithm using probabilistic object recognition. It is organized as follows; 1) recognizing artificial objects using imaging sonar, and 2) localizing the recognized objects and the vehicle using EKF(Extended Kalman Filter) based SLAM. For this purpose, we develop artificial landmarks to be recognized even under the unstable sonar images induced by noise. Moreover, a probabilistic recognition framework is proposed. In this way, the distance and bearing of the recognized artificial landmarks are acquired to perform the localization of the underwater vehicle. Using the recognized objects, EKF-based SLAM is carried out and results in a path of the underwater vehicle and the location of landmarks. The proposed localization algorithm is verified by experiments in a basin.

Acoustic signal is crucial for the autonomous navigation of underwater vehicles. For this purpose, this paper presents a method of acoustic source localization. The proposed method is based on the probabilistic estimation of time delay of acoustic signals received by two hydrophones. Using Bayesian update process, the proposed method can provide reliable estimation of direction angle of the acoustic source. The acquired direction information is used to estimate the location of the acoustic source. By accumulating direction information from various vehicle locations, the acoustic source localization is achieved using extended Kalman filter. The proposed method can provide a reliable estimation of the direction and location of the acoustic source, even under for a noisy acoustic signal. Experimental results demonstrate the performance of the proposed acoustic source localization method in a real sea environment.

This paper verifies the performance of Extended Kalman Filter(EKF) and MCL(Monte Carlo Localization) approach to localization of an underwater vehicle through experiments. Especially, the experiments use acoustic range sensor whose measurement accuracy and uncertainty is not yet proved. Along with localization, the experiment also discloses the uncertainty features of the range measurement such as bias and variance. The proposed localization method rejects outlier range data and the experiment shows that outlier rejection improves localization performance. It is as expected that the proposed method doesn’t yield as precise location as those methods which use high priced DVL(Doppler Velocity Log), IMU(Inertial Measurement Unit), and high accuracy range sensors. However, it is noticeable that the proposed method can achieve the accuracy which is affordable for correction of accumulated dead reckoning error, even though it uses only range data of low reliability and accuracy.

This paper proposes particle filter(PF) method using acoustic signal for localization of an underwater robot. The method uses time of arrival(TOA) or time difference of arrival(TDOA) of acoustic signals from beacons whose locations are known. An experiment in towing tank uses TOA information. Simulation uses TDOA information and it reveals dependency of the localization performance on the uncertainty of robot motion and senor data. Also, comparison of the PF method with the least squares method of spherical interpolation(SI) and spherical intersection(SX) is provided. Since PF uses TOA or TDOA which comes from measurement of external information as well as internal motion information, its estimation is more accurate and robust to the sensor and motion uncertainty than the least squares methods.