Precision acoustic navigation for remotely operated vehicles (ROV)

The ability to navigate a ROV to exact bottom locations or along a precise path is essential to many scientific and engineering tasks. Bottom and water column surveys along a precise and repeatable trajectory allow the monitoring of chemical and physical variables, and the study of sedimentation processes and biological phenomena. Precise navigation is also required for highresolution synthetic sonar observations and for placement and retrieval of various devices on the bottom. This paper reviews principles behind acoustic navigation and provides a survey of commercially available Ultra-Short Baseline (USBL) navigation systems. A novel high precision navigation system is proposed that offers several advantages over the surveyed systems. Specifically, the precise position and trajectory of a ROV tethered by a cable to a bottom node is obtained using sensitive phase measurement of an acoustic signal. Proof of this concept through shallow-water and deep-water prototypes will be carried out shortly at the University of Victoria.

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