Undersea communication network as a UUV navigation aid

Acoustic modems are the basis for emerging undersea wireless communications networks. US Navy Seaweb technology offers an opportunity to perform undersea navigation and tracking by virtue of node-to-node ranging measurements acquired as a by-product of the acoustic communications protocol. A simple localization algorithm is developed and verified with synthetic data and is then tested with an Unmanned Undersea Vehicle (UUV) during an experiment at sea. This work will look at improvements to an existing algorithm that was tested with data from the Seaweb UUV Test that was conducted in May 2005 in Monterey Bay. The main improvement that will be tested involves incorporating the third dimension (depth) into the equations.