INS/DVL Fusion with DVL Based Acceleration Measurements

Abstract: Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are increasingly used in many applications such as oceanographic surveys, mapping, and inspection of underwater structures. To successfully complete those tasks, a Doppler velocity log (DVL) and an inertial navigation system (INS) are utilized to determine the AUV navigation solution. In such fusion, DVL velocity measurement is used to update the navigation states. In this paper, we propose calculating the AUV acceleration vector based on past DVL measurements and using it as an additional update to increase the system's accuracy. Simulations and sea experiments were conducted to demonstrate the efficiency of our approach. The results indicate that the proposed method exhibits rapid convergence and significantly improves the overall performance compared to the baseline INS and DVL fusion approach.