Adaptive Robust Unscented Kalman Filter for AUV Acoustic Navigation

Autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) acoustic navigation is challenged by unknown system noise and gross errors in the acoustic observations caused by the complex marine environment. Since the classical unscented Kalman filter (UKF) algorithm cannot control the dynamic model biases and resist the influence of gross errors, an adaptive robust UKF based on the Sage-Husa filter and the robust estimation technique is proposed for AUV acoustic navigation. The proposed algorithm compensates the system noise by adopting the Sage-Husa noise estimation technique in an online manner under the condition that the system noise matrices are kept as positive or semi positive. In order to control the influence of gross errors in the acoustic observations, the equivalent gain matrix is constructed to improve the robustness of the adaptive UKF for AUV acoustic navigation based on Huber’s equivalent weight function. The effectiveness of the algorithm is verified by the simulated long baseline positioning experiment of the AUV, as well as the real marine experimental data of the ultrashort baseline positioning of an underwater towed body. The results demonstrate that the adaptive UKF can estimate the system noise through the time-varying noise estimator and avoid the problem of negative definite of the system noise variance matrix. The proposed adaptive robust UKF based on the Sage-Husa filter can further reduce the influence of gross errors while adjusting the system noise, and significantly improve the accuracy and stability of AUV acoustic navigation.