LOCALIZATION AND FUSION OF ECHOES WITH DEPLOYABLE MULTISTATIC ACTIVE SONAR: EVALUATION OF FEASIBILITY USING EXPERIMENTAL DATA

摘要

Deployable Underwater Surveillance Systems (DUSS) are a new active sonar concept based on a distributed network of small multistatic transmitter / receiver nodes. This study analyzes the contact localization capabilities of DUSS with both experimental data and simple modeling. Acoustic localization error medians of 118 m were measured analyzing 450 pings on 3 receivers in 2 frequencies and 3 target trajectories. This error produces a scattering of the contacts of the three receivers around their "barycentre", which is assumed by the multistatic system as the best estimation of the target position. Such scattering was found limited to an overall median value of 110 m. The integration of the distributed sonar nodes into a single, extended surveillance system is therefore possible with contact association windows of that size, corresponding to about 100 bearing - range cells. The improvement of contact localization errors re suiting from fusion is estimated around 22%. The experimental results do not depend on frequency, target trajectory, receiver monostatic / multistatic deployment geometry. Performance objectives and system specifications are also derived for prototype design. The precision of compasses and of assets deployment positioning is the most critical parameter, which needs improvements.