Constraining Acoustic Positioning with Vehicle Measurements from an Underwater Glider

Broadband acoustic transmissions from five moored transceivers were received by two autonomous Seagliders in August 2017 during the Canada Basin Acoustic Propagation Experiment. Long-range acoustic data from these receptions were utilized in a least squares inversion to obtain subsurface position estimates. Acoustic sources in this experiment did not transmit simultaneously and in some cases, position estimates spanned larger distances during the reception period than expected given typical horizontal vehicle speeds. Horizontal speeds derived from vehicle measurements can be used to impose a physical limit on the position estimation. Here, three iterations of the least squares model, using increasingly more vehicle data, are presented for two example acoustic receptions received on a Seaglider. The final iteration demonstrates how in situ vehicle measurements can be used to refine position estimates from long-range acoustic data.