Error Budget in Seabed Mapping

Seabed mapping and positioning is an important task for ship navigation and the offshore industry. This thesis describes some of the most common sensors that are used in a typical Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) survey spread and their specified accuracy. An error budget has been developed for calculating the horizontal and vertical errors of a seabed position based on the different sensor’s error influence and using the law of propagation. A Matlab programme has been developed by the author to do the calculations. A horizontal accuracy of 1.44 meter and a vertical accuracy of 0.14 meter were achieved on a latitude of 60 degrees with a ROV depth of 200 meter, a ROV altitude of 50 meter and a MBE beam angle off nadir of 30 degrees.