Self Calibrating, Self Locating Seismic-Acoustic Sensor System

There is an immediate need in urban conflicted areas for networks of disposable sensors that are rapidly deployable and that provide a sufficiently high data rate to move the burden of signal processing for data fusion to a central acquisition and processing resource. Although such a wide area sensing system promises gains in the utility of sensor networks, it presents several unique hardware and software challenges that must be addressed, especially in network management, data synchronization and sensor geolocation. Nova Engineering proposes Phase II seminal research culminating in the demonstration of the first “Self Calibrating, Self Locating Acoustic Seismic Sensor System” (S-CLASS). S-CLASS answers the need for large scale processing of sensor data distributed over a wide area, in applications such as event detection, source localization and target tracking. S-CLASS replaces legacy systems with tethered transducers and highly limited collection capacity, enabling large-baseline array processing over a large time aperture. S-CLASS is meant as a high-rate, shorter mission complement to existing and future low-rate sensor systems whose primary objective is a long service life. The prototype system consists of a COTS sensor controller, networked radio, and a software defined network controller that hosts the network management function and human interface.