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New low-cost commercially available bottom-lock Doppler sonars can augment or replace the acoustic time-of-flight navigation systems commonly employed for three-dimensional underwater robot vehicle navigation. The paper first reviews conventional techniques for underwater vehicle navigation, and describes a Doppler-based navigation system developed by the authors. Second, we identify principal limitations to the bottom-track precision of Doppler based navigation systems. Third, we analyze the effect of heading-sensor errors on Doppler bottom-track precision. Experimental results compare bottom-track error resulting from a Doppler navigation using low-precision magnetic heading sensor with bottom-track error resulting from a high-precision a ring-laser gyroscope. The experiments were conducted during a field deployment in which the new robot navigation system enabled precision acoustic and optical …