Preliminary results in under-ice acoustic navigation for seagliders in Davis Strait

Abstract

This paper presents an under-ice acoustic navigation system developed for Seaglider, a buoyancy-driven autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), and post-processed navigation results from one of fourteen glider deployments between 2006 and 2014 in Davis Strait. Seagliders typically receive all geolocation information from global positioning system (GPS) signals received while they are at the surface, and perform dead reckoning while underwater. Extended under-ice deployments, where access to GPS is denied due to the inability of the glider to surface, require an alternative source of geolocation information. In the deployments described herein, geolocation information is provided by range measurements from mooring-mounted acoustic navigation sources at fixed, known locations. In this paper we describe the navigation system used in Davis Strait and present navigation results from a six degree-of-freedom Kalman filter using post-processed navigation data.