Cooperative navigation of low cost Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

This work details the combination of inertial positioning sensors, accurate timing & clock synchronization, vehicle models, position estimation algorithms, and acoustic communication for the purposes of aiding navigation. The overall theme is the novel use of the aforementioned systems to create a coordinated network of accurately navigated autonomous maritime vehicles (AMVs), where maritime can stand for either surface (ASV) or underwater (AUV), that can be used for bottom survey and surveillance applications. This network can cooperate with another group of coordinated AUVs in order to maximize vehicle coverage rate while reducing total search time.