Underwater Terrain Navigation Using Standard Sea Charts and Magnetic Field Maps

Abstract

Many ships today rely on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), for their navigation, where GPS (Global Positioning System) is the most well-known. Unfortunately, the GNSS systems make the ships dependent on external systems, which can be malfunctioning, be jammed or be spoofed. There are today some proposed techniques where, e.g., bottom depth measurements are compared with known maps using Bayesian calculations, which results in a position estimation. Both maps and navigational sensor equipment are used in these techniques, most often relying on high-resolution maps, with the accuracy of the navigational sensors being less important. Instead of relying on high-resolution maps and low accuracy navigation sensors, this paper presents an implementation of the opposite, namely using low-resolution maps, but compensating this by using high accuracy navigational sensors and fusing data from both bottom depth measurements and magnetic field measurements. The results from the simulated tests, described in this paper, show that the position error is below 25m throughout the whole test, and that the mean of the error is below 13m, which in most cases would be accurate enough to use for navigation.