Enhancement of the inertial navigation system of the Florida Atlantic University autonomous underwater vehicles

The Institute of Ocean and Systems Engineering at Florida Atlantic University is currently developing a new generation of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), the MiniAUV. One major objective in its development is to provide a higher degree of navigation accuracy than the former generation of vehicle, the Ocean Explorer could achieve. To this end an embedded, real-time inertial navigation system has been developed for the past two years. It integrates high-precision navigation sensors while performing high frequency filtering and extensive data fusion methods, including a standard and an extended Kalman filter. This paper presents both the hardware and software architectures of the navigation system. Although the system is not fully operational yet, preliminary results were produced and are presented to illustrate the different features of the system.