Soft-Information-Based Underwater Tracer Localization with USBL Hydrophone Arrays

Abstract

Localization of underwater objects is required for numerous applications, including environmental monitoring, ropeless fishing, and equipment tracking. Ease of deployment and small, low-cost tracers running for years on a battery are incompatible with state-of-the-art solutions, especially in highly challenging multipath environments. We present a passive, soft-information-based localization method leveraging receiver mobility to estimate the 2D-location of a beacon signal with Angle of Arrival observations. The method is shown to be more robust than approaches that make hard decisions on time of arrival observations early on. Furthermore, we present the results in a real-world harbor environment, showing that median localization accuracy below 5m can be achieved.