A significant concern of the underwater platform is to measure position and posture in the water accurately. However, due to environmental factors, limited use of GPS data is the most critical of the navigation data. For this reason, the navigation system in the water has a larger proportion of the indirect navigation system using the speed and the acceleration, and this method has a large error.
To solve this problem, this paper proposes a leader-follower navigation method to measure the position and posture directly in the water. Leader-Follower Navigation is a way of sharing location and distance information of Underwater Vehicle and Surface Vehicle. To do this, each navigation of the underwater vehicle and the Surface Vehicle is required, and a navigation algorithm is needed to connect the two navigation systems to one navigation system. Also, it is necessary to use USBL and underwater communication modem to know the distance between the underwater vehicle and Surface Vehicle.
In this study, a hybrid underwater glider was selected as an underwater platform, and a Surface platform was used as a Surface Vehicle. Hybrid underwater gliders designed the control system by applying neural network self - tuning PID control algorithm. And to create hybrid underwater glider navigation, 6 DOF based motion equations and ARS (Attitude Reference System) were designed. ARS is implemented with Ring laser gyroscope, a geomagnetic sensor and extended Kalman filter. The Unmanned Surface Vehicle was implemented by applying GPS based navigation. And the Leader-Follower Navigation, which connects two navigation systems together, is implemented using a neural network-PID parallel controller.
To verify the validity of the proposed Leader-Follower Navigation, the simulation was performed using Matlab / Simulink, and experiments were conducted based on the simulation results.