Underwater acoustics--Instruments

The operation of unmanned underwater vehicles requires communications with other nearby vehicles as well as accurate positioning to prevent duplication of work, collisions and other mishaps. This thesis details the integration of an ultra-short baseline positioning system with four transducers arranged as a tetrahedron for use with the FAU Dual Purpose Acoustic Modem. The source position is estimated by processing coherently a series of frequency-hopped pulses to obtain a set of bearings, optimally combined through maximum likelihood estimation of the azimuth and elevation. A simulation has been implemented and experiments have been performed in a calibration tank. Model and experiments confirm that the accuracy of this system improves with the number of pulses and the signal-to-noise ratio. A mean positional error of 5.51% can be obtained with an SNR of 20 dB and a single processed pulse, the error decreases to 2.84% using six processed pulses.

Ultra-Short-BaseLine (USBL) is the most practical underwater acoustic positioning system for autonomous underwater vehicles because of its small space requirement. The objective of this research is to develop a USBL system capable of estimating a source location transmitting frequency-hopped tones sequences. Such sequences are characteristic of spread spectrum signaling used in underwater acoustic communication network. It must be able to provide azimuth and elevation of a modem-type source with an accuracy of 0.3 degrees; for both angles using the synchronization stage of the transmission. The acoustic antenna is composed of four transducers arranged as a tetrahedron. Using the model of Quazi and Lerro, which provides an expression for the variance of the bearing angle, azimuth and elevation of the transmitter are estimated employing maximum likelihood estimation. This system is simulated, tested and calibrated in a tank. Simulated results satisfy the requirement with a SNR of 32dB and 8 symbols. The latest experimental measurements present an accuracy of 3 degrees.