A precise underwater positioning method by considering the location difference of transmitting and receiving sound waves

To improve the underwater positioning precision of the traditional underwater positioning method that only uses one-way sound propagation, the paper proposes a new underwater positioning method by considering the location difference between transmission and reception of sound waves in circle-sailing positioning. In the method, firstly a fast calculation of the incidence angles was given under the depth constraint. And then, a precise positioning method was put forward by correcting the one-way travel time and considering the process of transmitting and receiving sound waves to double the observations to improve the underwater positioning precision. Two data sets observing the identical transponder were used to test the validity. The experiments verified the proposed method and the results showed that the precision of underwater positioning was improved considerably, especially in the vertical direction. The proposed method achieved the more uniform horizontal locations than the traditional method.