A method to address beam cross coupling errors in phased array Doppler sonar

Abstract

Performance of Doppler sonar is degraded by beam cross coupling errors. This performance degradation presents itself as the loss of precision and bias of velocity estimates output by the system. A model is proposed here to reveal the physical essence of the beam cross coupling. Specifically, the model can analyze the effects of environmental conditions and vehicle attitude on the coupling bias. Based on this model, a phase assignment method is also proposed to reduce the beam cross coupling bias. The results obtained for various settings validate the efficacy of the proposed method.