• Ocean and Polar Research
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.335-339
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• 2005

The underwater positioning system is important in interpreting data that are acquired from towing vehicles such as the deep-sea camera (DSC) system. Currently, several acoustic positioning systems such as long baseline (LBL), short baseline (SBL), and ultra short baseline (USBL), are used for underwater positioning. The accurate position of DSC, however, could not be determined in a R/V Onnuri unequipped with any of these underwater positioning systems. As an alternative, the DSC position was estimated based on the topography of towing track and cable length in the cruises before 1999. The great uncertainties, however, were found in the areas of flat bottom topography. In the 2003 and 2004 cruises these uncertainties were reduced by calculating the position of DSC with the cable length and seafloor depth below the vessel. The Japanese cruises for Mn-nodule used a similar estimation method for the DSC positioning system with a CTD sensor. Although the latter can provide better information for the position of DSC, the USBL underwater positioning system is strongly recommended for establishing better positioning of DSC and other towing devices.

• Proceedings of the Korea Committee for Ocean Resources and Engineering Conference
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• 2004.05a
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• pp.249-256
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• 2004

KRISO/KORDI is currently developing a deep-sea unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) system which is composed of a launcher, an ROV, and an AUV. Two USBL acoustic positioning systems will be used for UUV's navigation. One is for the deep sea positioning of all three vehicles and the other is for AUV's guidance to the docking device on the launcher. In order to increase the position accuracy MFSK(Multiple Frequency Shift Keying) broadband signal will be used. As the first step to the implementation of a USBL system, this paper studies USBL positioning algorithm using MFSK signals. Firstly, the characteristics of MFSK signal is described with various MFSK parameters: number of frequencies, frequency step, center frequency, and pulse length. Time and phase delays between two received signals are estimated by using cross-correlation and cross-spectrum methods. Finally an USBL positioning algorithm is derived by converting the delays to difference of distances and applying trigonometry. The simulation results show that the position accuracy is improved highly when both cross-correlation and cross-spectrum of MFSK signals are used simultaneously.