Attitude determination of autonomous underwater vehicles based on pressure sensor array

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are widely used in the marine exploration. Attitude determination is an important part for AUV to achieve its designed mission. This paper presents a novel sensor array constituted by four pressure sensors. Based on the theoretical analysis, the relationship between the measurements of pressure sensors and the attitudes is established. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed configuration, we design a multi-sensor integrated system of AUV combined with triaxial gyroscope, magnetic compass and pressure sensor array. The quaternion model and Extended Kalman filter (EKF) are selected to estimate the attitudes. The simulation results accord with the analysis to demonstrate that the proposed configuration is effective to improve the accuracy of the attitudes.