Method of Tracking Underwater Moving Objects by means of Unmanned Surface Vessels in Marine Environments

Abstract

The paper considers a method of forming and tracking trajectories of underwater moving objects (trajectory processing) by means of a small unmanned surface vessel, taking into account external disturbing effects from the marine environment. The proposed method is based on the processing of data received from a hydroacoustic station mounted on an unmanned surface vessel, and can be applied when it is not possible or impractical to deploy stationary hydroacoustic stations or when it is necessary to promptly complete a mission to track underwater objects in the water area where there is no appropriate infrastructure. Fuzzy logic methods are used to track moving objects, in particular to associate their measurements, an extended Kalman filter is used to estimate the position and velocity of underwater objects, and elementary rotation matrices are used to account for the varying orientation of a small unmanned surface vessel. In addition, this method takes into account the time delay in the propagation of the hydroacoustic signal. The simulation results confirmed the operability and effectiveness of the proposed method of tracking underwater objects.