An effective observability analysis for the leader-follower autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) cooperative localization based on range measurements

Sections 1 through 3 of the full paper explain our observability analysis mentioned in the titile, which we believe is effective and whose core consists of: (1) in the leader-follower structure, the leader can use high precision navigation system for precise localization but the follower is equipped with only low precision navigation system; thus, the followers need to combine the range measurements to the leader for underwater localization; (2) aiming at finding the influence of control inputs on the observability properties, we develop a kinematics model of the followers in the leader's body coordinate system; considering the range measurements as the observation, we perform an observability analysis for the cooperative localization with different control inputs with nonlinear observability rank condition based on Lie derivatives. Simulation results, presented in Figs. 2 through 4, and their analysis show preliminarily that, for the observable system, the position estimation of each follower has a good convergence and positioning accuracy.