SBIR-STTR Award

Unmanned vehicles (both Undersea and Aerial) provide opportunities to extend the Undersea Warfare capabilities of the US Navy. In this SBIR, OASIS proposes to develop a mission planning, operational control system for connecting various airborne assets with unmanned vehicles to improve undersea warfare. In order to combine assets that fall outside of traditional US Navy hierarchy (NAVAIR, NAVSEA, etc.) a new TDA, mission planning approach and C2 system must be developed. Mission planning will be based upon state-of-the art physics algorithms for handling passive and active acoustic Anti-Submarine Warfare as well as high-frequency acoustic and RF comms. Non-linear optimization approaches to efficiently determining the best lay-down and CONOPS will be developed, as well as a 3D visualization capabilities permitting viewing of airborne assets, comms links, undersea acoustic COMMS, ASW performance and environmental variability. The successful development of an undersea vehicle mission planning and visualization system will have commercial applications in the transportation sector (harbor/airport management) as well as oil exploration.

Benefit:
The successful development of an undersea vehicle mission planning and visualization system will have commercial applications in the transportation sector (harbor/airport management) as well as oil exploration.

Keywords:
Anti-Submarine Warfare, Anti-Submarine Warfare, Performance prediction, automated mission planning

The proposed work will address the core physics underlying acoustic reverberation as related to properties of the ocean environment and properties of the acoustic sources, receivers and waveforms that make up ocean-going acoustic systems of interest to the U.S. Navy. Present day active acoustic system performance models, which contain reverberation models as an essential component, are over twenty years old. At the same time, new applications for models come with new requirements as to their faithfulness to physics and execution speed. In this work OASIS will build and deliver a multi-static active performance prediction model that incorporates these new algorithms. The requirements for the model are both speed and fidelity. In addition to multi-static active, passive and radio-frequency (RF) anti-submarine warfare performance prediction will be built.

Benefit:
Successful implementation of the proposed physics-based improvements and processing speed enhancements to the tactical Navy reverberation models will lead to a more accurate and effective Active ASW system performance model. This improved accuracy and speed is a requirement of both the US Navy Air and Surface communities. Successful transition to the US Navy provides commercial opportunities to transition to the Ocean Atmospheric Media Library (OAML) via SPAWAR. Non-defense opportunities exist for the transition of novel ideas to the marine mammal acoustic mitigation community (environmental impact statements) and the oil-exploration community, where scattering from ocean environment is of significant importance.

Keywords:
Scattering, Coherent Modeling, Propagation Physics, Acoustic Reverberation, Clutter