A distributed micro sonar network for marine mammal monitoring

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2010-10, Vol.128 (4_Supplement), p.2333-2333
• Main Authors: Rotker, Nicholas A., Stein, Peter J., Edson, Patrick, Wood, John
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524
• DOI: 10.1121/1.3508247

The design of a distributed micro sonar network (DMSN) is presented. The DMSN is a miniaturized, low-power, and high-frequency version of the swimmer detection sonar network used to detect and track marine mammals at ranges out to 500 m. The intent is to use it for monitoring during potentially harmful military and commercial activities such as high-powered Navy sonar, oil and gas exploration, explosive removal of offshore structures, seismic exploration for research and oil and gas, pile driving to install maritime structures including offshore wind farms, and marine hydrokinetic energy devices such as free turbines. The system will consist of multiple single-beam sonars, each transmitting and receiving a unique signal in a narrow beam. The hardware and software will initially be ported to a Xilinx FPGA, with future versions done within a custom made ASIC. Initial hardware and software research and development will be described, as well as the work done to create computationally efficient signal processing algorithms. This work will potentially lead to the first ever prototype of a sonar-on-a-chip implementation. [Work supported by the NAVAIR SBIR Program and ONR.]