Low cost underwater acoustic localization

Abstract

Over the course of the last decade, the cost of marine robotic platforms has significantly decreased. In part this has lowered the barriers to entry of exploring and monitoring larger areas of the earth's oceans. However, these advances have been mostly focused on autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) or shallow water autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). One of the main drivers for high cost in the deep water domain is the challenge of localizing such vehicles using acoustics. Here we propose a novel low cost underwater modem design to assist in localizing deep water submersibles. The system will consist of location aware anchor buoys at the surface and underwater nodes. We present a comparison of methods, simulation of the proposed algorithms as well as experimental results, together with details on the physical implementation to allow its integration into a novel deep sea AUV currently in development.