  Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) have the ability to operate in harsh
underwater environments without endangering human lives in the process.
Nevertheless, just like their ground and aerial counterparts, AUVs need to be
able to estimate their own position. Yet, unlike ground and aerial robots,
estimating the pose of AUVs is very challenging, with only a few high-cost
technological solutions available in the market. In this paper, we present the
development of a realistic underwater acoustic model, implemented within the
Robot Operating System (ROS) and the Gazebo simulator framework, for
localization of AUVs using a set of water surface robots, time of flight of
underwater propagated acoustic waves, and a multilateration genetic algorithm
approach.
