Development of the SONAR System for an Unmanned Surface Vehicle

Abstract

Recently, unmanned systems are largely utilized in various fields due to the persistency and the least operational risk and an unmanned surface vehicle(USV) is the one of the representative application in the naval field. To assign multiple roles to an USV, we developed a sonar system which consists of a forward detecting sonar for the long-range detection, a downward detecting sonar for the small target scan and identification, and a strut type body for mounting sonar systems. In this paper, we described the developed sonar system for USV and the sea test results for verifying system performance. The test results showed that the developed sonar system was able to detect the underwater target about several kilometers away and could recognize a small object at the downside of the sonar system. We expect that the developed sonar system will be easily applied to other unmanned platforms without serious consideration.