SIGNAL SYSTEMS CORPORATION — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N171-053

Description

Signal Systems Corporation (SSC) proposes developing the Maritime Acoustic Sensing Unit (MASU) to provide situational awareness to manned and unmanned naval assets. The MASU leverages our innovative acoustic chambered design developed for robotic vehicles to provide a compact rugged, self-contained sensor capable of detecting, locating and classifying sounds.. We plan to demonstrate the capability of our compact sensor design to provide 360 detection, localization and classification of standard COLREGS signals out to one mile. We will improve our signal processing algorithms to detect and discriminate these sounds from non-navigational signals and develop a robust decision tree based classifier that will identify the signals to the operator. We will evaluate physical sensor design improvements to address the flow, wind, and platform noise effects, enabling us to meet the one mile detection range with good bearing accuracy.