Fusion of Multi-Sensors for Underwater Navigation and Localization
A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Sensor Networks".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (28 February 2022) | Viewed by 615
Special Issue Editors
Interests: underwater acoustics signal processing; underwater navigation; underwater communications and networks; marine observatories
Interests: underwater robotics; underwater navigation; adaptive sampling
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Advances in underwater robotics and autonomous systems have led to the emergence of underwater autonomous vehicles (AUVs) for applications ranging from undersea surveillance through seafloor mapping and seabed characterization to seabed survey and object recognition. At the same time, the scientific community has been deploying unattended systems and sensors at the seafloor or drifting in the water column at increasing depths and for increasing durations. In all these applications, key enabling technologies are navigation and localization. In the former, the vehicle is set to keep track on its planned course and to link findings to a geographic location. In the latter, an accurate estimation of the sensor’s location is required not only to confirm the location of the planned deployment, but also to connect findings to the geographic location. In the absence of GPS readings underwater, the deployed system relies on its onboard sensors and on external information for navigation.
Navigation of submerged vehicles is a demanding process with unique challenges, such as the effect of the water current, handling noise sources with few to no reliable measurements, and modeling dynamics in an ever-changing environment. Different than terrestrial or aerial navigation, where navigation fixes can be obtained from sources such as GPS or external beacons, handling the drift of underwater navigation system calls for the fusion of multiple sensors. These can be self-measurements from inertial sensors, depth meters or sonar systems, or external information from acoustic beacons, bathymetric maps, or objects of opportunity found on the seabed. Such fusion holds the potential to mitigate measurement noise, improve convergence, and resolve position ambiguities.
Recent years have shown innovative work both in improving the accuracy of navigation sensors and in the analysis to evaluate the navigation performance. Both experimental and theoretical works have constantly improved navigation capabilities, allowing AUVs to remain longer and search farther underwater. It is now the time to push these limits further by developing new ambitious methods for multisensor navigation. This Special Issue seeks innovative works in a wide range of research topics, spanning both theoretical and systems research, including results from industry and academic/industrial collaborations, related but not restricted to the following topics:
- Algorithms to combine sensors for underwater navigation or localization;
- Design of underwater navigation or localization systems combining multiple sensors;
- Filtering techniques for multisensor fusion;
- Experimental results demonstrating advantages of multisensor navigation or localization;
- Analysis of navigation and localization bounds, and limitation for the use of multisensors;
- Relative navigation in structured underwater environments;
- Cooperative localization and navigation.
Dr. Roee Diamant
Dr. Nuno Cruz
Guest Editors
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