Information-Aided DVL Calibration

The Doppler velocity log (DVL) velocity measurements are critical to the accuracy of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) navigation solutions and, consequently, to mission success.

To ensure accurate measurements, the DVL is commonly calibrated before mission start while the AUV sails on the water surface, receiving global navigation satellite system (GNSS) signals that provide accurate reference measurements.

Conventionally, Kalman filter-based approaches are employed during calibration to estimate the scale factor and misalignment errors.

However, in certain environments, GNSS signals may be unavailable, rendering conventional calibration impossible and forcing the use of uncalibrated DVL measurements, which degrades navigation performance.

To address this limitation, this work proposes information-aided calibration (IAC) with two main contributions: first, improving the accuracy of conventional Kalman filter-based calibration in GNSS-enabled environments, and second, enabling GNSS-free DVL self-calibration.

Using real-world AUV datasets, the proposed IAC models achieve up to a 20% average improvement in GNSS-enabled environments and up to a 35% improvement in velocity vector estimation during GNSS-free DVL self-calibration.

Overall, the proposed approach improves navigation accuracy, reduces navigation drift, and consequently enhances mission reliability.