AUV Navigation and Positioning
Increase the capabilities of your AUV and enable highly reliable, fully autonomous underwater missions at your fingertips!
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Navigating the depths with precision is essential for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) to perform complex tasks such as underwater surveys, inspections, detailed seabed mapping, and military subsea patrolling. Integrate the latest technologies from Water Linked into your AUV to increase accuracy and reliability in challenging underwater environments.
Ensure efficient AUV navigation with our DVLs
Our DVLs provide crucial data for accurate AUV navigation by measuring an AUV's velocity relative to the seabed. Our DVL A50 and DVL A125 can independently provide dead-reckoning navigation using their built-in IMU. Our user-friendly API allows our DVLs to easily integrate with an external INS for longer autonomous missions.
One may consider using an INS alone to perform dead-reckoning navigation, as it provides both heading and acceleration information; however, this is not sufficient. As the drift errors of inertial sensors are inevitable, the output of the INS diverges over time. This is where the DVL comes into play. A DVL is often used to suppress the drift of underwater inertial navigation. Integrating INS and DVL has become a standard configuration for AUV navigation.
Our DVLs not only enhance your AUV positioning accuracy but also increase your AUV’s potential for real-time adjustments to optimize paths and speed. Increasing your AUV's capability to follow high-precision pre-programmed paths can lead to a more systematic area coverage. The DVLs can ensure that your vehicles attain bottom lock and can make your AUV follow the seabed terrain more easily. Our DVLs also enable station keeping, allowing certain types of AUV to hover in the same position. This can lead to more detailed inspections, surveys, and filming.
Photo courtesy of Boxfish RoboticsNo visibility? No problem, with our Sonar 3D-15
Our Sonar 3D-15 provides clear three-dimensional images of underwater structures and environments, making it a great tool for supporting AUV navigation in environments where visibility is a big problem. Even when your onboard camera only picks up the turbid, murky water, our 3D sonar can show you exactly what your AUV is seeing. Although our sonar provides real-time imaging data, an AUV often lacks direct video streaming to the surface, so our 3D data can only be viewed once the data from the AUV has been downloaded.
The digitized point cloud data that our 3D sonar provides is ideal for detailed inspections and for creating intricate 3D point cloud models. Our Sonar 3D-15 is designed to fit any size of AUV, with its compact and efficient design and mere 0.4 kg in-water weight. You also don’t need to install any additional software to view or control the Sonar 3D-15 thanks to the sonar's web-based GUI offers easy access, aligning with Water Linked's commitment to user-friendliness.
Absolute positioning and real-time tracking in the most challenging environments
To make your AUV's navigation even more geospatially accurate, you can also integrate your INS/DVL system with an acoustic positioning system, such as our Underwater GPS. Our UGPS estimates the absolute position of underwater vehicles and enables real-time tracking of the AUV from a surface vessel or a fixed installation.
Our Underwater GPS is a short baseline system that enables AUV operators to achieve accurate positioning in even the most challenging environments, such as shallow water, inside tanks or pools, or around installations. Designed with portability, efficiency, and ease of use in mind, our Underwater GPS systems offer precise positioning and tracking capabilities (within 100 or 300 m) without many of the complexities associated with acoustic positioning..
Enhance your AUV missions with efficient communication ability
Our Modem M16 is a low-power and low-data-rate acoustic modem that fits any AUV vehicle, from the big to the absolute smallest. The Modem M16 is ideal for applications requiring efficient, minimal communication, such as environmental monitoring.
When you integrate multiple modems, you can:
- Send critical data from the surface to your AUV, such as position (waypoint) updates
- Let your AUV send critical data to the surface, such as status updates and alerts
- Support inter-AUV coordination
Our Modem M16 has a rapid boot-up time, allowing it to conserve power while being ready to take immediate action. It also requires very little power (2 watt-seconds) to transmit and receive data. This makes the Modem suitable for long missions, military operations, and emergencies. Our modem enables AUVs to perform essential tasks effectively while ensuring communication reliability for extended operational periods.
In the video on the left, you can see how our Modem M16 helped the Desert WAVE team win the RoboSub 2024 competition. The Desert WAVE team used two of our M16 modems to enable communication between their two autonomous underwater vehicles, Dragon and Baby Dragon.
The DVL's output was fused with other sensor data to deliver even more precise navigation and altitude control, enhancing our AUVs' ability to carry out operations and navigate with great precision.
- Craig Anderson, co-founder, Boxfish
Product features
Small size
Our sensors are all developed to fit on small vehicles as well as bigger ones, without compromising performance.
Light weight
Lightweight sensors allow fitment on lighter vehicles, and leave you with excess payload capacity for other equipment.
Low power consumption
Our smart, proprietary technology leaves more power for your other devices or can help free up payload capacity due to requiring
smaller battery packs.
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