AUV navigation: challenges and solutions
Kjetil Bergh Ánonsen, Kenneth Gade, Ove Kent Hagen · Institution of Engineering and Technology eBooks · 2020
The term navigation is commonly used to describe several different but related concepts. Some use the term for the process of determining the position (in some reference frame) and the orientation of the vehicle only, whereas others also include the problem of how to get from a point A to a point B in the navigation concept. In this chapter, we focus solely on the former meaning of the term. In other words, we define navigation to mean estimation of the six degrees of freedom of a rigid body (any vehicle or device), i.e., the position and orientation of the body. The position can be expressed in various reference frames (local or global), and the orientation is defined as the spatial orientation of the body frame relative to a local reference tangential to the Earth ellipsoid. This is more precisely defined in Section 5.2. It is often customary to include the estimation of linear and angular velocities in the navigation problem. The uncertainties of the estimates are often also part of the navigation output, and the navigation can be performed in real time, or in post -processing.