방향 모호성을 고려한 수중 음향 기반의 2차원 위치 추정 기술 개발

Abstract

Acoustic based localization is essential to operate autonomous robotic systems in underwater environment where the use of sensorial data is limited. This paper proposes a localization method using artificial underwater acoustic sources. The proposed method acquires directional angles of acoustic sources using time difference of arrivals of two hydrophones. For this purpose, a probabilistic approach is used for accurate estimation of the time delay. Then, Gaussian sum filter based SLAM technique is used to localize both acoustic sources and underwater vehicle. It is performed by using bearing of acoustic sources as measurement and inertial sensors as prediction model. The proposed method can handle directional ambiguity of time difference based source localization by generating Gaussian models corresponding to possible locations of both front and back sides. Through these processes, the proposed method can provide reliable localization method forunderwater vehicles without any prior information of source locations. The performance of the proposed method is verified by experimental results conducted in a real sea environment.