An integrated approach in the design of a navigation system for an AUV

Abstract An intelligent navigation system for an autonomous underwater vehicle known as Hammerhead is being developed by the University of Plymouth and Cranfield University. The Hammerhead navigation system is an integrated low-cost vision navigation subsystem and an inertial navigation system/global positioning subsystem. It is being developed to demonstrate the feasibility of using an integrated visual navigation system and inertial navigation system to navigate between intermittent global positioning system fixes whilst providing an enhanced imaging and tracking capability. This paper describes the present hardware/sensors composition, software design and preliminary experiment to combine measurement data from all the on-board sensors to derive an estimated position and orientation of the autonomous underwater vehicle during both submerged and surface operations.