Intelligible Long Range Acoustic Hailing

Long-range acoustic hailing and warning systems succeed at interrogating intent at safe standoff distances; communicating instructions, commands, and warnings at long range; and serving as nonlethal deterrents and suppressors to aggressors. The current generation of acoustic hailing devices, the long-range acoustic device (LRAD), has been in military use for close to two decades. Despite its success, there remains considerable room for improvement in speech intelligibility at range, overall size and weight, and the amount of user intervention necessary to operate the device. Creare proposes to develop the Advanced Long-Range Acoustic Hailer (ALRAH) to fill these operational gaps. The ALRAH features significant improvements over existing technologies. State-of-the-art drivers have better sensitivity and power handling capabilities, which boosts output levels. Novel array and horn designs improve long-range sound projection without adding size or weight. Signal processing algorithms make more efficient and effective use of the available power, improving downrange speech intelligibility. Embedded speech translation allows for use in global theatres. Optical systems range and track targets, automatically directing the system to steer the sound beam. Integrated environmental sensors allow the system to correct for local acoustic propagation characteristics. In Phase I, we will design and begin to evaluate key ALRAH subsystems to estimate overall ALRAH performance (downrange sound pressure level and speech intelligibility). In the Phase I Option we will continue to evaluate key subsystem performance, and we will design our Phase II test plans. In Phase II we will build and evaluate fully functional ALRAH prototypes.