Precise Positioning of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle in Post-processing Mode

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles plays specific role in underwater investigation. Generally, this kind of vehicles will move along a planned path for sea bottom or underwater installations inspections, search for mineral deposits along shelves, seeking lost items including bottom mines or for hydrographic measurements. A crucial barrier for it remains the possibility of precise determination of their underwater position. Commonly used radionavigation systems do not work in such circumstances or do not guarantee the required accuracies. In the paper some new solution is proposed on the assumption that it is possible to increase the precision by certain processing of a combination of measurements conducted by means of different techniques. Objective of the paper is the idea of navigation of AUV which consists of two phases: firstly a trip of AUV along pre-planned route and after that postprocessed transformation of collected data in post-processing mode. During the processing of collected data the modern adjustment methods have been applied, mainly estimation by means of least squares and M-estimation. Application of these methods should be associated with the measuring and geometric conditions of navigational tasks and thus suited for specific scientific and technical problems of underwater navigation. The first results of computer aided investigation will be presented and the basic scope of these application and possible development directions will be indicated also. The paper is prepared as an partial results of the works carried out within a framework of the research Project: 'Improvement of the Precise Underwater Vehicle Navigation Methods' financed by the Polish Ministry of Education and Science (No 0 T00A 012 25).