Celestial Navigation: A State-of-the-Art Review Towards a Light Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (LAUV) Conceptual Application

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are incompatible with the underwater domain as radiofrequency signals cannot penetrate the water column, leaving Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) reliant on dead-reckoning systems that accumulate positional errors over time. When AUVs surface to reset their navigation, they face another challenge: GNSS itself is increasingly vulnerable to jamming and spoofing in contested environments. Automated Celestial Navigation (CN) has emerged as a promising alternative to other navigation methods, making it possible to derive the absolute position from observations of celestial bodies, entirely independent of human-made signals. This work provides a state-of-the-art review of automated CN technologies, focusing on the literature from 2020 onwards. The review covers Solar Tracking Sensors (STSs), star trackers and horizon detection algorithms and assesses their suitability for AUV integration through a structured SWOT analysis. Following this, a conceptual CN system based on Sunto’s STS is developed for the Light Autonomous Underwater Vehicle platform employing a proposed ten-step integration methodology. Computer-Aided Design models illustrate the conceptual setup, though hydrodynamic/structural verification remains subject to future work. Results suggest that solar-based CN can serve as a periodic absolute position corrector within a hybrid AUV navigation architecture, without requiring satellite infrastructure, which contributes towards a more resilient AUV navigation.