Autonomous Underwater Navigation

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Overview

The field studies how underwater vehicles estimate their position and move safely when visibility is poor, currents disturb motion, and acoustic communication is delayed or unavailable. Localization commonly fuses inertial sensors with Doppler velocity logs, sonar, cameras, depth sensors, and acoustic positioning, using Kalman filters, SLAM, and learned estimators. For planning and control, researchers combine methods such as model predictive control, line-of-sight guidance, mapping and search, reinforcement learning, and physics-based world models. Simulation benchmarks enable broad testing, while pool and sea trials assess real-world reliability; a central challenge is making methods robust to unfamiliar environments and sensor failures without excessive computation or expensive hardware.

Latest papers

CardsList

50 papers3 papers in the last four weeks, down 75% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. DVL-DeepONet: A Physics-Guided Operator Learning for Resilient Underwater Navigation

    Jun 22, 2026Arup Kumar Sahoo, Itzik KleinUnderwater RoboticsPhysics-Informed ML

    The Hatter Department of Marine Technologies, Leon H. Charney School of Marine Sciences, University of Haifa, Haifa, 3498838, Israel

  2. ISOPoT: Imaging Sonar Odometry by Point Tracking

    Jun 22, 2026Jaša Samec, Vid Rijavec, Marko Peljhan +4Point TrackingRelative Pose Estimation

    Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, Večna pot 113, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia · OZON Research Group, TIMTEC, Goriska cesta 6c, Vipava, 5271, Slovenia · MAT Systemics, University of California, Santa Barbara, 3309 Phelps Hall, Santa Barbara, 93106-6065, California, United States of America +1

  3. Towards End to End Motion Planning and Execution for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Using Reinforcement Learning

    Jun 7, 2026Elisei Shafer, Oren GalHierarchical RLVisuomotor Policy Learning

    Department of Marine Technologies, University of Haifa, Israel

  4. 3D Underwater Path Planning via Generative Flow Field Surrogates

    Jun 4, 2026Zachary Cooper-Baldock, Paulo E. Santos, Russell S. A. Brinkworth +1Surrogate ModelingUnderwater Robotics

    Flinders University · PrioriAnalytica

  5. AI-Aided Advancements in Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Navigation

    May 6, 2026Guy Damari, Zeev Yampolsky, Nadav Cohen +4Underwater RoboticsAutonomous Underwater Navigation

    The Hatter Department of Marine Technologies, University of Haifa, Abba Khoushy Ave 199, Haifa, 3498838, Israel · Federal University of Lavras (UFLA), Campus Universitário, Lavras, 37200-900, MG, Brazil

  6. Task-specific Subnetwork Discovery in Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Underwater Navigation

    Apr 23, 2026Yi-Ling Liu, Melvin Laux, Mariela De Lucas Alvarez +2Reinforcement LearningUnderwater Robotics

    Robotics Innovation Center, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Bremen, Germany · Robotics Research Group, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

  7. BIND-USBL: Bounding IMU Navigation Drift using USBL in Heterogeneous ASV-AUV Teams

    Apr 13, 2026Pranav Kedia, Rajini Makam, Heiko Hamann +1Autonomous Underwater NavigationCooperative Localization

    Dept of Computer and Information Science, University of Konstanz, Germany · Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour, University of Konstanz, Germany · Dept of Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India

  8. Instantaneous Planning, Control and Safety for Navigation in Unknown Underwater Spaces

    Apr 7, 2026Veejay Karthik, Udit Ekansh, Tejal Bedmutha +3Autonomous Underwater NavigationSafe Motion Planning

    Centre for Systems and Control, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai · Institute for Control, Optimization, and Networks, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA

  9. A Survey on Sensor-based Planning and Control for Unmanned Underwater Vehicles

    Apr 6, 2026Shivam Vishwakarma, Tejal Bedmutha, Dharmendra Kumar Patel +2Underwater RoboticsAutonomous Underwater Navigation

  10. An Asynchronous Two-Speed Kalman Filter for Real-Time UUV Cooperative Navigation Under Acoustic Delays

    Apr 3, 2026Shuyue Li, Miguel López-Benítez, Eng Gee Lim +5Kalman FilteringGNSS-Denied Localization

    School of Advanced Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China · School of Computer Science and Informatics, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK · ARIES Research Centre, Universidad Antonio de Nebrija, Madrid, Spain +3

  11. Communication Outage-Resistant UUV State Estimation: A Variational History Distillation Approach

    Mar 31, 2026Shuyue Li, Miguel López-Benítez, Eng Gee Lim +5Robot State EstimationRobust Estimation

    School of Advanced Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China · School of Engineering, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK · Jiangsu JITRI Tsingunited Intelligent Control Technology Co., Ltd., Wuxi, China +4

  12. Predictive Modeling in AUV Navigation: A Perspective from Kalman Filtering

    Mar 28, 2026Zizhan Tang, Yao Liu, Jessica LiuAutonomous Underwater NavigationRobot State Estimation

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA · Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

  13. Neural Aided Adaptive Innovation-Based Invariant Kalman Filter

    Mar 17, 2026Barak Diker, Itzik KleinKalman FilteringInvariant EKF

  14. CORAL: COntextual Reasoning And Local Planning in A Hierarchical VLM Framework for Underwater Monitoring

    Mar 16, 2026Zhenqi Wu, Yuanjie Lu, Xuesu Xiao +1Autonomous Underwater NavigationVision-Language Navigation

    University of South Florida · George Mason University

  15. Hierarchical Multi-Modal Planning for Fixed-Altitude Sparse Target Search and Sampling

    Mar 9, 2026Lingpeng Chen, Yuchen Zheng, Apple Pui-Yi Chui +2Informative Path PlanningUnderwater Robotics

  16. Underwater Embodied Intelligence for Autonomous Robots: A Constraint-Coupled Perspective on Planning, Control, and Deployment

    Mar 8, 2026Jingzehua Xu, Guanwen Xie, Jiwei Tang +2Underwater RoboticsAutonomous Underwater Navigation

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong, China · Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen, 518055, China · Department of Data and Systems Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong +1

  17. Autonomous Sea Turtle Robot for Marine Fieldwork

    Feb 24, 2026Zach J. Patterson, Emily Sologuren, Levi Cai +4Underwater RoboticsAutonomous Underwater Navigation

    Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, 44106, USA. · Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, 02139, USA. · Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering Department, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, 02543, USA. +1

  18. Online Navigation Planning for Long-term Autonomous Operation of Underwater Gliders

    Feb 22, 2026Victor-Alexandru Darvariu, Charlotte Z. Reed, Jan Stratmann +21Autonomous Underwater Navigation

    Oxford Robotics Institute, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK · Optiver, Amsterdam, The Netherlands · Stateful Robotics, Oxford, UK +3

  19. Docking and Persistent Operations for a Resident Underwater Vehicle

    Feb 18, 2026Leonard Günzel, Gabrielė Kasparavičiūtė, Ambjørn Grimsrud Waldum +6Underwater RoboticsAutonomous Underwater Navigation

    Applied Underwater Robotics Lab NTNU Trondheim, Norway

  20. SHRUMS: Sensor Hallucination for Real-time Underwater Motion Planning with a Compact 3D Sonar

    Oct 21, 2025Susheel Vadakkekuruppath, Lauritz R. Fosso, Michail Chatzispyrou +4Autonomous Underwater NavigationMotion Planning

    Susheel Vadakkekuruppath and Jason M. O’Kane are with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University, USA · Herman B. Amundsen and Marios Xanthidis are with the Aquaculture Robotics and Automation, SINTEF Ocean