Abstract:

Currently, the U.S. Navy uses active acoustic pingers for tracking vessels on its test and evaluation ranges. Although tracking accuracy for these ranges is excellent, this performance comes with some penalties. For instance, test realism can be lost due to loud pinger emissions, small or prototype vehicles might require modification for pinger installation, and ship time is often lost during fitting and removal of pingers. Drawing upon the U.S. Navy's experience in passive tracking, advances in matched mode localization, and increases in computational capacity, passive acoustic tracking on T&E ranges can now be implemented. The use of pingers is not required and realism is restored to the testing scenario. Test target hardware is no longer required and the cost of the traditional shallow-water hydrophone grid can be reduced. One design for a passive tracking range utilizes acoustic arrays with vertical and horizontal apertures, in situ environmental monitoring, fast and accurate propagation models, and real-time tracking algorithms. Results from several recent field tests demonstrate the potentials and challenges of passive acoustic signature tracking on T&E ranges. The results are compared with ground truth data as well as range simulations and error analysis.