Bearings-only acoustic source localization method using two distributed gliders and deep ocean experimental validation in the South China Sea

Passive acoustic localization using distributed mobile underwater sensor networks has emerged as an important research subject. This paper presents a bearings-only localization method for two distributed gliders equipped with conformal uniform circular arrays. The paper proposes a Sage–Husa adaptive extended Kalman filter (SHEKF) that dynamically estimates measurement noise covariance to handle different sensor measurement quality, enabling accurate localization. A deep ocean experiment was conducted in the South China Sea using two gliders separated by a 6.37 km baseline. The SHEKF method achieved a root-mean-square error of 0.58 km, demonstrating effective performance for underwater acoustic target localization.