Multistatic, synthetic aperture tracking of bottom objects by AUV networks

In a joint effort between the NATO Undersea Research Center (NURC) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) the SWAMSI´11 experiment demonstrated the viability of multi-static sonar tracking techniques for seabed and sub-seabed targets. Although multistatic tracking requires some complexity to implement, it offers several advantages over mono-static tracking. By detecting the backscattered energy at the monostatic and several bi-static angles simultaneously, the probabilities of both target detection and target classification are improved. This is especially useful for detecting targets with minimal backscatter profiles. Furthermore, this arrangement allows us to arbitrarily vary the bistatic angle, which is useful for detecting targets with differing amounts of reflected energy at various bistatic angles. We discuss the preliminary results of analyzing the data collected during this experiment.