Multi-ship Sonar Bistatic Automatic Active Localization

Metron and Adaptive Methods propose to design a sonar bistatic active processing concept to exploit off-board active transmissions for improved target prosecution. A fundamental challenge with bistatic operation is high fidelity estimation of the source kinematic state and transmission state parameters. A critical goal of our proposed effort is a methodical mapping of source state estimate and its uncertainty through the signal and information processing chain and its impact on target detection, tracking and localization. Analytical and simulated data will be used to support the Phase I study and to assess the impact for differing multi-ship geometries and environments. The error budget to system performance mapping product will impose practical constraints in the development of our Phase I concept. We propose to design, develop and demonstrate enabling source localization and source tracking algorithms for practical multistatic tracking in a staged approach to achieve these objectives: (1) conduct a sensitivity analysis of the effects that source localization errors have on target tracking, (2) develop a system architecture and technical approach to achieve source state estimation performance to fully exploit bi-static operations, and (3) develop innovative algorithms and demonstrate proof of concept capability using simulated data.