Optimal hydrophone placements under random perturbations

To improve the performance of an array of hydrophones used to locate an acoustic source, an approach is proposed for hydrophone placement which minimizes a conventional bearing or range variance bound averaged over the random deviation of sensor positions. The Cramer-Rao lower bounds are used on localization error covariances to distribute the sensors in an effective manner for line and towed arrays. The source localization problem for M sensors is formulated. A lower bound on the estimate of the localization parameters from the measurements is examined. This is then applied to a simple line array and to a towed array for various levels of sensor position uncertainty. The results are utilized to distribute the sensors in approximately optimal fashion