METRON INCORPORATED — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: N23A-T021

Description

The goal of the proposed effort is to develop a new acoustic sensor that utilizes directional ambient sound to extract features about the underwater environment. The sensor package will be able to be integrated into a variety of host platforms, deployed for months to years with a power budget of approximately 1 W, and automatically process and extract relevant features in the soundscape for near-real-time wireless transmission. New algorithms to extract soundscape features will be developed using existing ambient sound data sources and targeted to the proposed acoustic listening hardware, with the ability to scale to accommodate future host platform capabilities.  The initial sensor package design is envisioned to be integrated with the Teledyne APEX float first. APEX is a reliable and cost-effective platform with established worldwide usage for several decades. The combined sensor and vehicle package will be called “Environmental Collection and Observation Float” or “ECO-Float” for short. Teledyne will partner with Metron and Portland State on this effort to provide engineering support for acoustic sensing integration. Several engineering trade-off analyses will be conducted to determine the most efficient method of obtaining acoustic and other data needed to characterize environmental parameters. The proposed sensor package hosting these new algorithms will be designed to minimize SWaP-C to improve the feasibility of deployment of 10s to 100s in a sea and 1000s worldwide.