Grant: Engage Grants Program

Underwater acoustic target tracking in ocean environment has attracted considerable interest in both military and civilian applications. For underwater target tracking, sonar systems often use remote sensors, such as sonobuoys, which are deployed from an airplane or ship and submerged for monitoring the underwater acoustics. Such systems fall into two categories: passive systems, and active systems. Sonobuoys are used to detect and track underwater objects emitting sounds in case of passive systems or reflecting those generated by a source in case of active systems. The focus of this project is multistatic active sonobuoy systems. The problem of multi-target tracking in multistatic active sonobuoy systems is challenging because of the large number of false contacts and the multiple reflections reaching the receivers. Bearing and range estimates are subject to large errors due to errors in source and sonobuoy position estimates and bearing error inherent to the sonobuoy design. This work seeks a robust solution that enhances the tracking capability by exploiting more measurements in addition to the bearing and range measurements commonly used in this problem. Under this project a target tracking module (owned by the industrial partner, Akoostix Inc.) will be enhanced to use additional measurements in order to produce a more robust tracking algorithm. The applicant research team will work on defining the theory and the method of applying the additional measurements to the Akoostix software, as well as developing the necessary routines for the enhanced Akoostix software. Both the Akoostix team and the applicant research team will compare the results of the enhanced Akoostix tracker to the current tracker.