Smart Isolation Mounts for Airborne Guns (SIMAG)

Not Available With the advent of quieter threats and the shift in operational emphasis from deep-ocean to literal areas future airborne ASW systems will increasingly rely on acoustic-receiving buoys with increased spatial discrimination to combat increased ambient noise, reverberation and multi-path effects. The implication is that signal detection and classification must now be performed on the time series outputs of a large number of beams. Current and planned buoy to aircraft communications channels cannot accomodate this increased load. Current multiple beam sensors (ADAR) address this by reduced frequency band coverage relative to the former DIFAR full band. Even with this reduced coverage, which may cause signals of interest (SOI) to be missed, transmitting raw acoustic data from all beams and sensors would overwhelm the operators. This effort addresses the problem by defining innovative system-level concepts and algorithms for autonomous in-buoy detection and contact processing of the beam time series such that only critical target information is transmitted to the monitoring aircraft. A goal will be to restore the full band of acoustic signal processing while minimizing power consumption. Although the emphasis is on active search processing the concepts are extensible to passive search and nontraditional methods as well.