Marine Robots in Environmental Surveys: Current Developments at ISME—Localisation and Navigation

Despite the growing interest that marine engineering has received during the past few decades, autonomous underwater navigation can be still considered a daunting task. Unfavourable environmental conditions and limitations on the typologies of available sensors increase the difficulties autonomous vehicles encounter during the execution of planned missions. As of today, one of the main challenges researchers face is the precise localisation of underwater vehicles, where the limitation of the error drift over time becomes extremely important for long navigation missions. In recent years, the authors, within ISME—Interuniversity Center of Integrated Systems for the Marine Environment, extensively worked on autonomous underwater navigation, with special focus on positioning techniques. Working in parallel, research was conducted on the topics of both the improvement of state-of-the-art navigation techniques and on the employment of local sensor networks to periodically reset position errors. This contribution reports the most significative results obtained by the authors during these years.