Tightly and Loosely Coupled Architectures for Inertial Navigation System and Doppler Velocity Log Integration at Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

The Inertial Navigation System(INS) and Doppler Velocity Logs(DVL) which are used frequently on autonomous underwater vehicles can be fused under different types of integration architectures. These architectures differ in terms of algorithm requirements and complexity. DVL may experience acoustic beam losses during operation due to environmental factors and abilities of the sensor. In these situations, radial velocity information cannot be received from lost acoustic beam. In this paper, the performances of INS and DVL integration under tightly and loosely coupled architectures are comparatively presented with simulations. In the tightly coupled approach, navigation filter is updated with solely available beam measurements by using sequential measurement update method, and the sensitivity of this method is investigated for acoustic beam losses.