Abstract: To solve the positioning problem of a multi-joint underwater vehicle, a integrated navigation algorithm based on strapdown inertial navigation+dead reckoning is proposed in this paper. The method measures the position of vehicle by the strapdown inertial navigation, and gets the position of the vehicle at the next moment by the dead reckoning, and the measured information is processed by Kalman filter to get the high accuracy position information. The performance of other two single navigations systems are studied comparatively on MATLAB/SIMULINK platform. The simulation results show that the position error can be controlled within 5 m when using the integrated navigation algorithm, which can meet the positioning requirements of the multi-joint underwater vehicle.

Key words: multi-joint underwater vehicle, positioning, strapdown inertial navigation+dead reckoning, integrated navigation, Kalman filter