Underwater multizonotope terrain‐aided navigation method with coarse map based on set‐membership filter

Terrain‐aided navigation (TAN) is a viable method to achieve long‐term underwater navigation for long‐range autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). However, the high‐accuracy positioning results of most TAN systems rely on precise a priori seabed terrain maps, which restricts their applicability to a few areas with accurate bathymetric measurements of the seabed terrain. This article introduces a TAN system based on the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO) data set for global marine applications. Specifically, to address the low accuracy and poor robustness of the TAN system with imprecise bathymetric measurement and low‐resolution data from the GEBCO data set, this article proposes a multizonotope TAN method based on set‐membership filter (SMF) theory. The SMF theory is employed to handle the unknown distribution of the measurement noise from the GEBCO data set, introducing a multizonotope measurement update model to achieve more precise navigational results while addressing the perceptual ambiguity caused by self‐similar terrain. The smoothness of the terrain is incorporated as a parameter in the generation ranges of multizonotope, enabling adaptive adjustment based on terrain smoothness to reduce costs and enhance navigational performance. The accuracy and robustness of the proposed method are verified through all shipboard experiments, publicly available data sets, and AUV experiments. Compared with state‐of‐the‐art TAN methods, the average and maximum positioning errors have decreased by 64.83% and 48.84%, respectively. Finally, based on the experimental results, a preliminary distribution of suitable areas in the oceans is provided.