Advanced Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Long Range Under-ice Navigation and Localization

所有加拿大人都受到研究工具的影响并从中受益，这些工具包括：有助于深入了解加拿大冰下海洋及其与气候变化的联系;安全可靠的可航行北方沃茨;以及用于监测、巡逻和跟踪水下活动以维护加拿大北极主权和国防的长时间装置。 自主水下航行器（AUV）是在这三个领域工作的工具。 这三种能力的限制是AUV在没有外部传感器辅助的情况下进行远距离导航和定位的能力。 这还没有达到它应该达到的程度。 拟议研究计划的成果为实现这一目标提供了重要的里程碑。 它提供了解决这些问题的转型能力，并以前所未有的方式支持海洋部门。*** * 为了使AUV通过在船舶或操作员的臂距之外操作来充分实现其价值，它们必须在水下和冰下进行长距离导航和定位，而无需船舶或AUV外部定位传感器的帮助，这些传感器不是冰下的选项。 由于惯性系统的位置误差随着行进距离的增加而无限增长，因此外部辅助是必要的。 通过同步定位和地图绘制（SLAM），AUV将使用外部辅助的惯性传感器导航未知区域。 在使命期间，AUV建立地图并同时在地图中定位自身，因此其勘测传感器测量是地理参考的。 使用AUV，惯性导航受到外部位置辅助的范围的限制，并且不能在远离海底的地方操作。 这种解决方案限制了AUV可能的操作范围。* 除了利用外部传感器辅助惯性导航的最先进SLAM之外，我的研究项目还研究了利用地球物理或地形导航而不是外部传感器辅助惯性导航的无特征（抽象特征）SLAM，因为它更适合冰下环境。* 类似于将GPS或声学位置辅助传感器与惯性导航融合，先验地图中的地形辅助（测深）导航（TAN）特征用于限制惯性传感器的位置误差增长。 与水下惯性或声学导航方法不同，TAN方法不受操作范围或高度的限制。 TAN是实现远距离冰下AUV导航和定位的一种潜在的强有力的解决方案。* 为了实现具有测深TAN的机载在线SLAM，所提出的研究所青睐的SLAM方法是姿态图。 *** ******

All Canadians are impacted by, and benefit from, research into tools that: contribute insight on Canada's under-ice oceans and their connection to changing climate; safe and secure navigable northern waters, and long duration devices to monitor, patrol and track underwater activity for Canadian Arctic sovereignty and defence. Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) are tools tasked to work in all three. The limiting capability in all three is the AUV ability to navigate and localize over long ranges unassisted by external sensors. This does not exist yet to the extent that it should. The outcomes of the proposed research program contribute important milestones towards this. It provides a transformational capability to address these topics and supports the ocean sector in an unprecedented way. *** *For AUVs to fully realize their value by operating at more than arms-length from a ship or operator, they must navigate and localize long distances underwater and under-ice without assistance from a ship or external-to-the-AUV positioning sensor which are not options under-ice. The external aiding is necessary as the positional error of inertial systems grown unbounded with distance travelled.*** With simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) the AUV will navigate an unknown area using inertial sensors which could be externally aided. During the mission, the AUV builds the map and concurrently localizes itself within it so its survey sensor measurements are geo-referenced. With AUVs, inertial navigation is limited by the range of the external positional aiding and cannot operate far from the seabed. This solution restricts the AUV operational range possible.*** Beyond the state-of-the art SLAM with inertial navigation aided by external sensors, my research program studies featureless (abstract features) SLAM with inertial navigation aided by geophysical or terrain navigation instead of external sensors as it better suits the under-ice environment. *Similar to fusing GPS or acoustic position aiding sensors with inertial navigation, terrain-aided (bathymetric) navigation (TAN) features in a priori maps are used to bound the position error growth of the inertial sensors. Unlike underwater inertial or acoustic navigation methods, TAN methods are not limited in operational range or altitude. TAN is a potentially powerful solution towards long range under-ice AUV navigation and localization. *To work towards on-board on-line SLAM with bathymetric TAN, the SLAM method favored for the proposed research is pose-graph. *** ******