Range-only benthic rover localization off the central California coast

Nowadays, the use of autonomous vehicles for ocean research has
increased, since these vehicles have a better cost/performance ratio than crewed
vessels or oceanographic ships. For example, autonomous surface vehicles can be
used to localize underwater targets. This paper describes a mission to find a crawling
robot - Benthic Rover - on the abyssal plain in the north eastern Pacific, using
single-beacon localization from onboard a Wave Glider autonomous surface vehicle.
While the Wave Glider is moving around the surface in the target zone, it takes
ranges between the target and itself using acoustic modems. With these ranges it
can compute the target location, as a Long Baseline (LBL) system. The benefit of this
approach is the reduction of cost and complexity relative to deployment of a traditional
shipboard LBL system. Additionally, this is a mobile system, and can cover
long distances, and can geolocate multiple targets over a large area.