Author(s)

Tae Suk Yoo

Maritime R&D Center, LIG Nex1 Co. Ltd., Gyeonggi-Do, South Korea.

The purpose of this paper is to design a DVL-RPM based VKF (Velocity Kalman Filter) design for a performance improvement underwater integrated navigation system. The integrated navigation sensor using DVL (Doppler Velocity Log) is widely used to improve the underwater navigation performance. However, the DVL’s range of measuring varied depending on the characteristics of sensor. So, if the sea gets too deep suddenly, it cannot measure the velocity. To complement such a weak point, the VKF was additionally designed, which was made of DVL, RPM (Revolve Per Minutes) of motor, and ES (Echo Sounder). The proposed approach relies on a VKF, augmented by an altitude from ES based switching architecture to yield robust performance, even when DVL exceeds the measurement range and the measured value is unable to be valid. The proposed approach relies on two parts: 1) indirect feedback navigation Kalman filter design, 2) VKF design. To evaluate the proposed method, we compare the VKF aided navigation system with PINS (Pure Inertial Navigation System) and conventional INS-DVL navigation system through simulation results. Simulations illustrate the effectiveness of the underwater navigation system assisted by the additional DVL-RPM based VKF in underwater environment.

IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit), Kalman Filter, VKF (Velocity Kalman Filter)

Yoo, T. (2014) DVL/RPM Based Velocity Filter Aiding in the Underwater Vehicle Integrated Inertial Navigation System. Journal of Sensor Technology, 4, 154-164. doi: 10.4236/jst.2014.43015.