I. POSITION OF THE PROBLEM.pdfVIP

Integrated Short Term Navigationof a Towed Underwater BodyG. Damy1 M. Joannides2 F. LeGland3 M. Prevosto1 R. Rakotozafy21 IFREMER Brest, DITI/GO/SOM, BP 70, 29280 PLOUZANE, France2 INRIA Sophia Antipolis, BP 93, 06902 SOPHIA{ANTIPOLIS Cedex, France3 IRISA / INRIA Rennes, Campus de Beaulieu, 35042 RENNES Cedex, FranceI. POSITION OF THE PROBLEMThe following ocean engineering problem is con-sidered. An underwater body, to be called here-after the sh, is towed by a surface ship at the endof a few hundred meters long cable, and uses itssidescan sonars to make observations of the bot-tom of the sea, a few thousand meters below. Toenhance the antenna resolution, a virtual antennais built up by adding up appropriately the echoesreceived by the moving physical antenna. To makethis SAS (synthetic aperture sonar) experiment ef-ciently, it is needed to know with an accuracy of afew centimeters, the trajectory of the sh relativeto its otherwise unknown initial position, during afew minutes experiment, so that motion compen-sation can be performed during the synthetic aper-ture processing.For this purpose, acceleration measurements pro-vided by an INS (inertial navigation system) lo-cated on board of the sh, can be integrated. INSmeasurements are known to track accurately thehigh frequency components in the mobile trajec-tory. However, even on small time intervals, in-tegration of INS measurements can result in un-acceptable drifting in position estimates, i.e. poorestimation of low frequency components of the mo-bile trajectory. To prevent this drifting in positionestimates, it is common to use additional measure-ments which could provide good estimates of thelow frequency components of the mobile trajec-tory. For example, the following additional sensorscould be used : (i) a quartz pressure sensor, provid-ing submersion measurements, (ii) an electromag-netic velocity probe, (iii) a magnetic heading sen-sor, etc. Combining the two complementary typeof measurements would