Auto aligning system for narrow beam acoustic telemetry

Unmanned untethered submersibles can perform many tasks more effectively than can manned or tethered unmanned vehicles. Successful performance of these tasks often requires video feedback from the submersible to a remote operator. Acoustic high frequency attenuation and multipath conditions present serious obstacles to the transmission of video images, but these barriers can be lowered using narrow beam transducers and compressed video signals. These solutions, which maximize transmit bandwidth, requires that one transducer array always points at a second array. A tracking system has been constructed and is being tested to demonstrate a practical application of the principle of diverging beams.