A practical VME‐based sonar system development workstation

Abstract

This paper describes present capability and furture development plans of a practical low‐cost sonar system‐development work station based on off‐the‐shelf VME equipment. The work station allows system engineers and algorithm designers to quickly develop sonar processing algorithms and systems. The work station can be used to (a) simulate and analyze the characteristics of real time environments for system and algorithm development, (b) concurrently develop final implementation software, and (c) generate analog test data for system test and operator instruction. The work station overcomes many of the difficulties experienced with developing sonar acoustic signal acquisition and processing systems: high design and maintenance costs of custom equipment; lack of controllable test data; inability to correlate simulation data with final system performance; and high software development costs, particularly with parallel, pipelined signal processing equipment. The sonar development work station hardware consists ...