An automated framework for long-range acoustic positioning of autonomous underwater vehicles.

An automated method was developed to align underwater acoustic receptions at various depths and ranges to a single reference prediction of long range acoustic arrival structure as it evolves with range in order to determine source-receiver range. Acoustic receptions collected by four autonomous underwater vehicles deployed in the Philippine Sea as part of an ocean acoustic propagation experiment were used to demonstrate the method. The arrivals were measured in the upper 1000 m of the ocean at ranges up to 700 km from five moored, low frequency broadband acoustic tomography sources.