Beam Forming Property of Coded Acoustic Signal for Long-Range Acoustic Navigation of a Cruising Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

Abstract

The property of beam forming by a receiver array placed on the side surface of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is considered in this paper. The aim of this study is to develop a long-range acoustic navigation system for a cruising AUV on the basis of the estimation of the horizontal direction of arrival (DOA) of an acoustic signal from reference source. The acoustic signal is coded using a maximum length sequence code. The influence of multipath waves to the estimation of horizontal DOA was particularly studied. When there are several multipath waves from various vertical DOAs, even if the horizontal DOAs of all the waves are the same, the multipath waves are influential to the estimation of the horizontal DOA. Then, the coded signal is useful to avoid the influence of the multipath waves. An exploratory experiment on the propagation of the acoustic signal for distance of about 16.6 km was performed in Suruga Bay. By simulating the condition similar to the experiment, it was indicated that the accuracy of the estimation of the horizontal DOA is within zero point several degrees in the experiment.