Airborne ASW systems and sonobuoys operate in selected portions of the acoustic spectrum. Passive and active sensors not only contend with friendly forces operating in-band but must contend with other non-cooperative signals that degrade sensor performance including environmental interference, unintended out of band transmissions from our own sensors, and commercial interference from other sources. The goal of this effort is to define, design and develop sensor-agnostic signal processing techniques to reduce or eliminate in-band interferences that obscure or degrade the performance of passive or active ASW. The Navy has taken preliminary steps to mitigate such interference in their design of current sonobuoys. These included in-buoy spectral filtering, beamforming, and null-steering. While these do provide some reduction, more is needed to mitigate high energy interferers. RDA and L3 Adaptive Methods believe viable solutions must include accurate characterization of known and unknown interferers to leverage a priori information, robust algorithms for mitigating such interferers at the individual sonobuoy and sonobuoy field level, and application to a variety of sonobuoy types and platforms for both passive and active ASW capabilities and missions.
Benefit: The key benefit to the U.S. Navy is a sensor-agnostic, low system impact capability to significantly reduce or mitigate high-energy acoustic interferers for both passive and active ASW sensors and missions. A critical requirement of the solution is that the capability not alter any hardware or software in the sonobuoy, nor should it alter anything in the sonobuoy RF uplink. All signal processing and data manipulation software resides onboard the aircraft, receiving station, or other such platform. The primary beneficiary of the SBIR technology includes the current MAC and emerging MAC-E family of sonobuoys, as well as future sonobuoys under development such as the High Gain Array and the Extended Range DIFAR.
Keywords: Signal processing, Signal processing, Noise, Noise cancellation, anti-submarine warfare (ASW), ASW performance, signal,
