Passive localization using flexible hydrophone array

Abstract

Localizing a radiated acoustic source in shallow water precisely is a difficult problem. To achieve this goal, a large aperture between hydrophones should be considered. But a large and rigid array is not convenient when used by ship. Here a flexible hydrophone array is designed to solve this problem. The position of each array hydrophone is randomly placed. Spherical interpolation method is used to estimate the position of acoustic source. This method need precise 3-D coordinates of each hydrophone to estimate 3-D coordinates of the source. In this paper a new method is derived to estimate the coordinates of each hydrophone. Computer simulation is conducted to analysis the performance of passive localization algorithm using the flexible array. Factors such as time-delay, hydrophone coordinates, and array shape, which affect the localization performance are discussed. Lake trial results are presented and show that the experiment results agree highly with the simulation results.