Low-cost noise maker for testing acoustically guided unmanned vehicles

Abstract

Testing the performance of the Acoustically Guided Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (AGUUV) prior to its deployment is essential to ensure its ability to perform the required tasks accurately. These systems can be deployed from boats or helicopters to scan areas of military and economic importance for threats. These threats such as aircrafts carriers, ships, submarines, divers, and autonomous surface vehicles. The problem of implementing a low-cost high-performance noise maker (LCNM) which is suitable for being used as a test target instead of different threats for AGUUVs is the motivation of this paper. Lab experiments and sea trials are performed using the proposed noise maker to demonstrate the proper operation of the AGUUV. Lab experiments showed that the radiated noise of the proposed noise maker has high power in the frequency band between 5 to 8 kHz. The measured signal to noise ratio (SNR) for the introduced LCNM is 30 dB in this band. The experimental results presented in this paper show the feasibility of using the proposed LCNM effectively to test the AGUUVs.