Distributed underwater acoustic source localization and tracking

Jun Ye Yu, Deniz Üstebay, Stephane Blouin, Michael G. Rabbat, Mark Coates

Abstract: We consider the problem of localizing and tracking an acoustic noise source under water using bearing measurements taken from a small collection of acoustic sensors. Nodes must cooperate in order to improve their estimates and overcome significant noise levels and spurious measurements from clutter. However the underwater communication channel is highly unreliable, which makes coordination challenging. We evaluate the performance of distributed particle filtering methods in the setting where nodes communicate over unreliable links. Our results are validated using data from an experiment conducted at sea.