SIGNAL SYSTEMS CORPORATION — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N171-048

Description

SSC will develop adaptive transmit control (ATC) and Bayesian environmental characterization (BEC) to supplement existing adaptive beamforming technology and close the loop to realize a fully adaptive active sonar (FAAS) for mid-frequency anti-submarine warfare. ATC will automatically adjust transmit parameters such as waveform, amplitude, duration, repetition rate, and spatial pattern to optimize both track maintenance and search activities without operator involvement. BEC will combine in-situ measurements and physics-based acoustic modeling to develop a probabilistic description of the prevailing environment that is carried forward to the signal excess calculations needed by ATC. Our approach naturally accommodates source restrictions such as thermal limits and waveform crest factor so that our solution achieves significant performance improvements with minimal impact to existing fleet hardware and software. A FAAS simulator will be developed to establish performance levels for U.S. Navy SQQ-89 and LCS VDS systems, examining key metrics such as probability of detection, false alarm rate, target echo SNR, latency of optimization, and robustness to parameter mismatch. The two new key algorithms, ATC and BEC, will be demonstrated and validated in real-world airborne active sonar field experiments.