Sea currents estimation during AUV navigation using Unscented Kalman Filter

An Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) able to estimate the direction and the magnitude of a priori unknown marine currents is described in the paper; the currents estimation is performed during the navigation of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) together with the estimation of the vehicle navigation state. The filter here proposed is born augmenting the state of an UKF previously developed by the same authors. The proposed approach is validated offline exploiting the data of the onboard sensors of MARTA AUV (MArine Robotic Tool for Archaeology), collected during recent sea trials in La Spezia, Italy. In the near future the algorithm will be implemented onboard the vehicle to carry out an online estimation of the marine currents.