Development of an underwater sound monitoring system using two hydrophones for a remotely operated underwater vehicle

Abstract

Recently, a sound monitoring system for hearing fishery sound using three hydrophones installed on an ROV (Rountree and Juanes, 2010) has been developed. However, the operation of the system was not successful because of the high level of the self-noise generated by the ROV. Its thrusters had to be turned off to reduce the self-noise and listen to fishery sound clearly. Currently, Korea Research Institute of Ships and Ocean Engineering (KRISO) is developing a light-work class ROV and a similar sound monitoring system was developed for the ROV. The design of the system was focused on the following two strategies: (1) minimization of self-noise effect; (2) reproducing sound for operators to identify source direction. To minimize the self-noise effect, a digital filter with seven filter banks with octave bandwidth was implemented. A time-domain beamforming technique has been applied to analyze the source location. Reproducing sound signals for the two speakers in the control room were generated according to the estimated source location. The performance of the algorithm was verified by using a receiver array signal simulator. Its detail characteristics will be presented in the talk. [This work was financially supported by the research project # 20130197 funded by KIMST.]