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Talk-30: Navigation and C2 Ranging for Undersea Vehicles in the Midwater Column
Ethan Park [1], Supun Rendeni [2]
[1] Triton Systems
[2] MIT Dept of Mechanical Engineering, MIT Sea Grant
This talk highlights an improved navigation method for undersea vehicles operating in the midwater column without DVL/CVL bottom-lock or water-track measurements. A set of GPS-equipped surface buoys acoustically broadcasts their positions and C2 information, precisely on the clock, according to a predefined TDMA schedule. One or multiple time-synchronized vehicles operating in the area can use the one-way travel time of these acoustic messages to aid the onboard HydroMAN navigation engine. An environment-aided ray-tracing model converts the measured travel time into horizontal range, which is then fused with other sensor measurements using HydroMAN's self-learning, model-aided navigation framework. Because the vehicles are passive, any number of UUVs can navigate simultaneously using the same acoustic broadcasts. The TDMA schedule and message types are user-configurable, allowing the system to switch, when required, to active UUV modes in which the vehicles occasionally transmit for surface tracking. The system is agnostic to modem type, provided that the modem supports one-way travel-time estimation with reasonable accuracy.