Performance Enhancement for Conventional Tightly Coupled INS/DVL Navigation System Using Regeneration of Partial DVL Measurements

Abstract

Inertial navigation systems/Doppler velocity log (INS/DVL) integrated navigation systems are widely used in underwater environments where GPS is unavailable. An INS/DVL integrated navigation system is generally loosely coupled; however, this does not work if any of the DVL transducers do not work. If a system is tightly coupled, velocity error can be estimated with fair accuracy even if some of the transducers fail. However, despite the robustness of a tightly coupled system compared to a loosely coupled one, velocity error estimation accuracy of the former decreases as the number of faulty transducers increases. Therefore, this paper proposes an INS/DVL/revolutions per minute (RPM) integrated navigation filter designed to improve the performance of conventional tightly coupled integrated systems by estimating data from faulty transducers using RPM data. Two salient features of the proposed filter are (1) estimating RPM data accounting for error from the effect of tidal currents and (2) continuous estimation of error in RPM data by selectively converting only the measurements of faulty transducers. The performance of the proposed filter was first verified using Monte Carlo numerical simulations with the analysis range set to 1 standard deviation (1 σ, 68%) and then with real sea test measurement data.