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Encyclopedia of Robotics pp 1–15Cite as

Navigation for Underwater Vehicles

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Introduction

Accurate navigation is vital for the safety and effectiveness of AUV missions. AUVs are now being used for a variety of tasks, including oceanographic surveys, demining, and bathymetric data collection in marine and riverine environments. Accurate location information is essential to ensure the utility of the gathered data for these applications, for example, to ensure adequate coverage a desired area for mapping missions, with no gaps.

Underwater vehicle navigation is challenging compared with terrestrial applications due to the unavailability of GPS and to the unique physics of sensing in the marine environment. Above water, most autonomous systems rely on radio or spread-spectrum communications and global positioning. However, electromagnetic signals attenuate rapidly underwater, and therefore acoustic waves are needed to achieve long-range sensing or communication. The propagation of acoustic signals underwater can be notoriously complex (Medwin and Clay, 1998), with...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mila, Université de Montréal, Montreal, Canada

    Liam Paull

  2. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada

    Mae Seto

  3. Department of Computing Imperial College London, London, UK

    Sajad Saeedi

  4. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    John J. Leonard

Authors
  1. Liam Paull
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  2. Mae Seto
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  3. Sajad Saeedi
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  4. John J. Leonard
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Liam Paull .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Mechanical Engineering Blk 1E Gillman Hts #17-43, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Marcelo H Ang

  2. Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

    Oussama Khatib

  3. Dipto di Informatica e Sistemistca, Univ di Napoli Federico II, Napoli, Italy

    Bruno Siciliano

Section Editor information

  1. University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, Cassino, Italy

    Gianluca Antonelli

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Paull, L., Seto, M., Saeedi, S., Leonard, J.J. (2018). Navigation for Underwater Vehicles. In: Ang, M., Khatib, O., Siciliano, B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Robotics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41610-1_15-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41610-1_15-1

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