Towards an autonomous underwater vehicles test range: At-sea experimentation of bearing-only tracking algorithms

Underwater navigation performance of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) strongly affects the quality of the collected data. Scientific literature extensively addresses the AUV tracking and self-localisation problems. However, no standard evaluation methods for vehicle navigation exist. Therefore, the authors’ visionary perspective is to develop and implement an Underwater Test Range (UTR) to certify the vehicle compliance with long-term underwater navigation. This paper describes a first step along this research path represented by an in field validation of such conceived measurement network. Experiments are soundly based on extensive simulation analysis presented in previous works. In particular, an underwater network composed of acoustic modems with Ultra Short BaseLine capabilities is deployed as measurement rig. This setup, through bearing-only measurements, allows the tracking of an Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV) equipped with Differential GPS as position ground truth. Results show how the proposed methodology performs in a real marine scenario with challenging conditions due to shallow waters and magnetically noisy environment.