Gravity aided inertial navigation system (GAINS), which uses earth gravitational anomaly field for navigation, holds strong potential as an underwater navigation system. The gravity matching algorithm is one of the key factors in GAINS. Existing matching algorithms cannot guarantee the matching accuracy in the matching algorithms based gravity aided navigation when the initial errors are large. Evolutionary algorithms, which are mostly have the ability of global optimality and fast convergence, can be used to solve the gravity matching problem under large initial errors. However, simply applying evolutionary algorithms to GAINS may lead to false matching. Therefore, in order to deal with the underwater gravity matching problem, it is necessary to improve the traditional evolutionary algorithms. In this paper, an affine transformation based artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm, which can greatly improve the positioning precision under large initial errors condition, is developed. The proposed algorithm introduces affine transformation to both initialization process and evolutionary process of ABC algorithm. The single-point matching strategy is replaced by the strategy of matching a sequence of several consecutive position vectors. In addition, several constraints are introduced to the process of evolution by using the output characteristics of the inertial navigation system (INS). Simulations based on the actual gravity anomaly base map have been performed for the validation of the proposed algorithm.
Keywords: bio-inspired navigation; evolutionary algorithm; gravity aided navigation; navigation systems; optimization; underwater vehicle.