Towards on-line underwater vehicle trajectory estimation using diffusion-based observers

This work extends previous work (Jouffroy and Opderbecke, 2004) on the estimation of underwater vehicle trajectories using Gyro-Doppler (body-fixed velocities) and acoustic signals (earth-fixed positions). The approach consists of diffusion-based observers processing a whole trajectory segment at a time, allowing the consideration of important practical problems such as different information update rates, outages, and outliers in a very simple framework. We detail issues related to real-time applications, such as implementation and convergence. A theorem guaranteeing stability of the observer and simulation examples are given.