Schock, Steven G.

Navigation of Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) is commonly assisted in confined areas by acoustic positioning systems. The Department of Ocean Engineenng at Florida Atlantic University is developing an altemative system based on submerged modems. This thesis describes an optimal target location estimation technique using a multi-channel spatial receiver array (Millscross) used as a development tool combined with a synchronous modem and transponder network mounted on buoys and UUVs. The Millscross provides a reference to evaluate the performance of the navigation estimator. Spatial array principles are used to develop decoding and beamforming techniques to process modem messages, enabling the end user (the UUV) to estimate in real-time its own position and navigate in space. A simulation was used to compare actual results with theory and determine the processing and decoding algorithms. These algorithms were then applied to real data to estimate the target position (direction of arrival and geodetic coordinates).

Underwater communication is an important component of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) operations. Communicating underwater is limited to very low communication rates without the use of processing techniques that mitigate the influence of the acoustic channel. This thesis develops array processing techniques for frequency hopping and multiple frequency shift keying to achieve long range, reliable high speed communications. The thesis makes the comparison between two techniques for calculating beamforming coefficients: a coherent Least Mean Square (LMS) adaptive filter and a non-coherent LMS. An Equal Gain Combiner (EGC) and a Maximum Likelihood (ML) were used to determine the performance of the coherent and non-coherent LMS. The results show that by using the coherent LMS, the ML or the EGC, communications at rates of 493 bit per second (bps) and 370bps can be achieved with no frame error at 5km in 40 feet of water using 16.3kHz of bandwidth centered at 25kHz.

An automatic mine detection method has been designed for the purpose of locating mine-like objects on the seabed in real time using a high frequency, high resolution side scan sonar. The processing flow includes a calculation of the average scattering function of the local environment, shadow detection, and a fuzzy logic clustering/fuzzy logic detection procedure for identifying mine-like shadows. An Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) equipped with a fuzzy detection system gives the Navy the capability of rapidly locating bottom mines in littoral underwater environments during over-the-horizon operations.