RDA INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N162-099

Description

The evolution of the U.S. Navys ASW sonobuoy capabilities has been both impressive and daunting. Source sonobuoys ping faster and with a greater numbers of pings. Receiver sonobuoys use many more beams to listen for echoes or energy of interest. On-aircraft radios concurrently monitor significantly more sonobuoys over a larger field. And overlapping ping strategies ensonify the water from multiple directions and frequency bands simultaneously. Combined, these advances in technology, capability, and strategy deliver tremendous additional amounts of acoustic data. This can overwhelm the ASW operator with information, making it difficult to adequately review all the incoming data, and perform the ASW search mission, using traditional methods and approaches. In a world of emerging and renewed threats, increasing technologies, and shrinking budgets, new methods and tools must be developed to assist the warfighter more efficiently accomplish his task. One approach to reducing operator workload is to use Transmission Loss estimation to help discriminate clutter from possible target echoes. Unfortunately, empirically measuring Transmission Loss or even the environmental state is not feasible or reliable. However, the additional data provided by the developments in the Navys ASW sonobuoy technology and strategy afford opportunities to develop statistical models that adequately estimate Transmission Loss