BIND-USBL: Bounding IMU Navigation Drift using USBL in Heterogeneous ASV-AUV Teams

TL;DR

BIND-USBL is a cooperative underwater localization framework that uses surface vessels with USBL systems to bound AUV navigation drift in GPS-denied environments, optimizing fix delivery and formation geometry.

Contribution

This work introduces a novel multi-ASV formation and scheduling approach to improve intermittent USBL-based localization for AUVs, addressing geometric and coverage challenges.

Findings

Localization performance depends on survey scale, acoustic coverage, and team geometry.

The proposed scheduler increases fix delivery rate while maintaining low latency.

Simulation results demonstrate improved localization accuracy in heterogeneous ASV-AUV teams.

Abstract

Accurate and continuous localization of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) in GPS-denied environments is a persistent challenge in marine robotics. In the absence of external position fixes, AUVs rely on inertial dead-reckoning, which accumulates unbounded drift due to sensor bias and noise. This paper presents BIND-USBL, a cooperative localization framework in which a fleet of Autonomous Surface Vessels (ASVs) equipped with Ultra-Short Baseline (USBL) acoustic positioning systems provides intermittent fixes to bound AUV dead-reckoning error. The key insight is that long-duration navigation failure is driven not by the accuracy of individual USBL measurements, but by the temporal sparsity and geometric availability of those fixes. BIND-USBL combines a multi-ASV formation model linking survey scale and anchor placement to acoustic coverage, a conflict-graph-based TDMA uplink scheduler for shared-channel servicing, and delayed fusion of received USBL updates with drift-prone dead reckoning. The framework is evaluated in the HoloOcean simulator using heterogeneous ASV-AUV teams executing lawnmower coverage missions. The results show that localization performance is shaped by the interaction of survey scale, acoustic coverage, team composition, and ASV-formation geometry. Further, the spatial-reuse scheduler improves per-AUV fix delivery rate without violating the no-collision constraint, while maintaining low end-to-end fix latency.