Cooperative Navigation for Multiple Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Using a Single Leader

This paper studies the cooperative navigation problem for a group of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). The relative positioning problem is solvable when dead-reckoning data is combined with relative range data through an acoustic communication network between the leader and the follower vehicles. An extended Kalman filter is then designed to estimate the position of the follower vehicles. Finally, cooperative navigation results and a comparison with dead-reckoning navigation are presented from numerical simulations.