An acoustic system for autonomous navigation and tracking of marine fauna

Abstract

A marine acoustic system for underwater target tracking is described. This system is part of the Integrated Satellite and Acoustic Telemetry (iSAT) project to study marine fauna. It is a microcontroller-based underwater projector and receiver. A narrow-band, passive sonar detection architecture is described from signal generation, through transduction, reception, signal processing and up to tone extraction. Its circuit and operation principles are described. Finally, a comparison between the current energy detection method versus an alternative matched filter approach is included.