For reasons of mission flexibility, operational range, and stealth, the Navys needs for acoustic communication with unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) currently exceeds the capabilities of commercially available transducers. In addition to lacking sufficient data rate for more than loose supervisory control, their inability to provide highly-directional, seamlessly-steerable acoustic transmission dramatically limits their operational utility. The commercial demand for steerable and directional transducers appropriate for UUV integration has been soft, and as a result most transducers appropriate for UUV applications operate with a fixed beam pattern in a near omnidirectional mode. Dynamically steerable, directional acoustic transmitters could enable UUV swarming operations and operationalize clandestine communications by steering the transmitted acoustic energy toward intended receivers while minimizing acoustic energy in unwanted directions. A large fraction of existing UUVs are limited to low-bandwidth, loose supervisory control unless surfaced. This slow, fixed-pattern link to radio/satellite-connected surface assets is a bottleneck that reduces their utility in present detection-decision-action kill chains that take hours or days, when they could be measured in minutes. OceanComm has developed, deployed, and fielded a novel acoustic link technology offering orders-of-magnitude improvement in data rate, including its M1-H150 megabit-per-second (Mbps) acoustic modem, capable of live streaming high-definition (HD) videoa worlds first. Demonstration videos of this unique capability can be viewed on the companys website. This Phase I technical effort will develop the design methodologies, modeling capabilities, and early prototype designs to advance the electronically steerable transducer technology developed at OceanComm in its M2 Beamforming Acoustic Modem, based on the compact, multi-channel capabilities of its mini-array transducer technology. The design and development of the M2 Beamforming Acoustic Modem, was targeted specifically for scalable data-rate/range pairs, from 1Mbps data rates over distances of several hundred meters, to 100kbps data rates at distances of several kilometers, with graceful degradation to 10kbps at 10km distances. Target deployments for the M2 include integration into small, medium, large and extra large UUVs. Through three technical objectives, this proposed effort will develop the design and evaluation methods for a range of digitally-steerable, beamforming transducers and the associated drive electronics, to enable a host of UUV operational concepts that are simply not possible today. Acoustic modems will serve as integration examples.
Benefit: The directional transducer technologies under development in this Phase I SBIR have the potential to dramatically increase the operational utility of unmanned underwater vehicles in US Naval operations. In particular, the improvements in mission flexibility, operational range, and stealth can be dramatically enhanced through highly-directional, seamlessly-steerable acoustic transmitters for underwater acoustic communications. The enhancements in transducer integration due to their compact size, weight and power, coupled with the dramatic increase in spectral efficiency and data rate, will enable a host of new applications, from clandestine, wireless UUV video surveillance, to LPI/LPD operation across Naval UUV concepts of operations.
Keywords: UUV, UUV, Steerable, Acoustic Modem, mini-array, Small Form Factor, Video Streaming, directional transducers
