Alternative navigation in underwater environments is essential to prevent accumulating drift error of dead reckoning. In case of using an external positioning system, the installation and management process of the transmission station is cumbersome, and the operation range of underwater vehicle is limited. In order to solve this problem, navigation using geophysical information such as terrain, geomagnetic field and gravity can be used. Unlike the terrain, geomagnetic field and gravity are composed of 3-D information, so continuation process is required. In this paper, we present a integrated navigation algorithm using multiple geophysical information for long-term operation of UUV. The proposed algorithm is verified through numerical simulation in an artificially generated environments. As a result, integrated navigation showed higher navigation accuracy than single alternative navigation.

In this study, a model-referenced underwater navigation algorithm is proposed for high-precise underwater navigation using monocular vision near underwater structures. The main idea of this navigation algorithm is that a 3D model-based pose estimation is combined with the inertial navigation using an extended Kalman filter (EKF). The spatial information obtained from the navigation algorithm is utilized for enabling the underwater robot to navigate near underwater structures whose geometric models are known a priori. For investigating the performance of the proposed approach the model-referenced navigation algorithm was applied to an underwater robot and a set of experiments was carried out in a water tank.