An investigation of the capabilities of a short hydrophone array towed by an ocean glider

Abstract

During the Shallow Water Experiment (SW06) a Webb Slocum glider, deployed by Rutgers University, demonstrated that gliders are promising vehicles for towing short acoustic arrays. The gliders saw-tooth trajectory allows for sampling the water column at varying depths and ranges. Further, the glider provides a low-speed platform, allowing for a flow-noise free towed array, which is ideal for the processing of low level signals. One attractive application for glider-towed arrays is target tracking. By using the passive synthetic aperture effect, coupled with a near-field model for the signal, the coordinates of an acoustic source can be estimated using a Kalman filter, but without the necessity of the maneuver normally required by bearings-only tracking. This is possible since the large aperture traced out by the glider permits wavefront curvature to be exploited for range estimation. Using synthetic narrowband data, it is shown that the range and bearing of a low-level acoustic source can be estimated without changing the gliders course. The algorithm is based on an Unscented Kalman Filter. Also, an approach for the broadband problem is outlined. [Work sponsored by the Office of Naval Research.]