A TDOA underwater localization approach for shallow water environment

This study concerns the implementation of an underwater positioning system in shallow water environment. Shallow water localization of the beacon is done by using the propagation of acoustic signals in water. The experiment is based on the use of a boat equipped with two hydrophones and an emitting beacon. The signal received on each sensors are processed to compute the difference in time arrival between them (TDOA) and to derive the boat location. In this paper a close loop architecture is proposed to process the signal. This architecture based on a Kalman filter allows to track the peaks of correlation in a delay Doppler map. Underwater tests are done to validate the method. They lead to a precision of about one meter.