Interactive transponder array design with real-time GDOP analysis and positioning accuracy visualization
Long Baseline (LBL) systems use seafloor-mounted acoustic transponders to provide absolute position fixes. The vehicle measures round-trip acoustic travel times to compute its position via multilateration. Positioning accuracy depends critically on transponder geometry - GDOP (Geometric Dilution of Precision) quantifies how measurement errors amplify into position errors. Configure the array and see GDOP in real-time.
Position is computed from range measurements to multiple transponders with known locations:
GDOP quantifies how range errors magnify into position errors:
where H is the observation matrix with rows: [Δxi/Ri, Δyi/Ri, Δzi/Ri]
The actual positioning error depends on GDOP and range measurement noise: