A high performance tilt-pan mechanism for narrow beam acoustic telemetry for marine robots

One of the recognized pivotal technologies required for the development of unmanned untethered submersibles is provision of high performance acoustic telemetry links for retrieval of real-time video information in high multipath channels. The interference effects of multipath may be minimized by the use of narrow beam transducers which must be correctly aligned along the most robust communication path. This paper describes the on-going development of such a system using a new compact high performance tilt-pan mechanism for automatic alignment of small transducers arrays at each end of the link. Positioning accuracies of better than and slew rates of better than /s are obtained.