Easily Deployable Underwater Acoustic Navigation System for Multi-Vehicle Environmental Sampling Applications

Water as a medium poses a number of challenges for robots, limiting the progress of research in underwater robotics vis-a-vis ground or aerial robotics. The primary challenges are satellite based positioning and radio communication being unusable due to high attenuation of electromagnetic waves in water. We have developed miniature, agile, easy to carry and deploy Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) equipped with a suite of sensors for underwater environmental sensing. We previously demonstrated adaptive sampling and feature tracking, and gathered data from a lake for limnological research, with the AUV performing inertial navigation. In this paper, we demonstrate a new underwater acoustic positioning system, which allows on-board estimation of AUV position. Our system uses absolute time information from GNSS for initial clock synchronization and uses one-way-travel-time for range measurements, which makes it scalable in the number of robots. It is easily deployable and does not rely on any installed infrastructure in the environment. We describe various hardware and software components of our system, and present results from experiments in Lake Geneva.