Advances in the development of an acoustic location system for application in underwater autonomous gliders

Abstract

Accurately determining the location of seafloor-deployed scientific sensor units has become increasingly critical, particularly when considering the unstructured distribution of multiple unlinked devices. To access the data stored on these nodes, an underwater vehicle has been proposed to exchange data. Given the challenge of locating nodes in an unknown configuration, an acoustic positioning system has been developed to help the vehicle reduce the uncertainty in identifying the various units within the seafloor lander network. This paper presents the first experimental results on the accuracy and feasibility of the developed location system.