SBIR-STTR Award

Detecting the presence of marine mammals is paramount in lessening man’s impact on the environment as we search the oceans for natural resources. Most human operations in oceans use high powered acoustic sources that can disturb, disrupt, main or kill marine mammals. The ability to detect, identify and locate marine mammals is critical during these operations to mitigate harm. Passive acoustics has been found to be a highly reliable method to detect marine mammals but work is required to improve the process of locating them and decrease the system cost. There is significant literature on detection of marine mammals but little is available on systems that can determine bearing and range especially over the broad spectrum of marine mammal phonation. Such systems exist in expensive military hardware but low cost methods are required due to the economics that drive marine mammal detection. Low noise and highly sensitive systems are required to detect and locate marine mammals at the farthest range possible thus providing the widest coverage. The government has imposed regulations requiring marine mammal detection when ocean operations may harm the animals, so there is a significant need for low cost, real-time, high performance, reliable, towed passive acoustic system.

Detecting the presence of marine mammals in paramount in lessening man’s impact on the environment as we search the oceans for natural resources. Many human ocean activities use high powered acoustic sources that can disturb, disrupt, maim or kill marine animals. The ability to detect, identify and locate marine mammals is critical during these operations to mitigate harm. Passive acoustics is a reliable method to detect and localize marine mammals but the necessary volumetric acoustic methods generally require expensive systems that are also expensive to deploy. During Proteus’ Phase I effort, we demonstrated real-time detection and localization at high tow speeds with a small, low cost volumetric array. The design proved to be highly stable at 10 knots tow speeds. During the Phase II effort, our plans are to improve our basic Phase I prototype design into a fully operational pre-production design that improves on the localization performance of the Phase I prototype that is low cost, reliable, modular and rugged. There is significant worldwide commercial potential for such as system in marine mammal population studies and mitigation efforts.