Underwater Distributed Magnetometers
Leif Christensen
series DFKI Documents, volume 15-03, pages 8, Sep/2015. DFKI GmbH.
Abstract
:
This talk outlines a new approach to deal with dynamic distortions of the ambient magnetic field often
leading to errors in orientation estimation in confined unmanned underwater vehicles. In such systems,
the space to mount magnetometer sensors is strictly limited and the sensors are often in the vicinity of
distortion sources like ferromagnetic material, sonar transducers or strong electric currents flowing through
nearby supply lines. The talk describes a threefold approach to deal with these magnetic field distortions:
the use of multiple distributed magnetometers for robustness, the use of very small pressure-neutral sensors
to get rid of mounting restrictions inside pressure compartments and the development and application of a
multi-magnetometer fusion algorithm using von Mises-Fisher distributions to compute undistorted orientation
information.
This talk is a preliminary version of the talk that was presented at the MTS/IEEE OCEANS’15 conference in
Washington DC in conjunction with the paper ”Distortion-Robust Distributed Magnetometer for Underwater
Pose Estimation in Confined UUVs” authored by Leif Christensen, Christopher Gaudig and Frank Kirchner.