Range-Only Single Beacon Based Multisensor Fusion Positioning for AUV

Underwater high precision positioning and navigation is a key technical support for underwater accurate operation of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). Traditional AUV localization adopts acoustic positioning system (APS) mostly, and long baseline (LBL) is one of the most widely used. LBL can achieve a high positioning accuracy, but multiple acoustic beacons need to be deployed. The deployment, calibrating, and recycling of those beacons are time-consuming and labor-intensive. This article focuses on range-only single-beacon (ROSB) technology to realize AUV localization. Compared to LBL, ROSB can reduce the time and labor of deploying beacons greatly with only one beacon adopted. Aiming at the weakness of initial observation capacity in ROSB, a virtual beacon and adjustment theory-based initial location calculating algorithm is proposed. Furthermore, a ROSB-based underwater multisensor fusion positioning (UMFP) method using factor graph is presented, in which ROSB is fused with other sensors equipped on AUV. Experiments and simulations show that the ROSB based UMFP scheme can not only save time and labor greatly compared to LBL, but also achieve a high positioning accuracy.