Dolphin-inspired sonar system and its performance

Abstract

The sonar of dolphins has developed over millions of years of evolution and has achieved excellent performance levels. Using the excellent performance of the dolphins sonar as an inspiration, bio-inspired wideband acoustic sensing methods for underwater target detection and tracking are being developed. In this study the authors explore what they expect to gain from such a wideband sonar. The systems wideband sensors are based on bottlenose dolphins sonar, covering a frequency band from around 30 to 150 kHz and having a frequency dependent beamwidth considerably larger than that of conventional imaging sonars. The system can be made relatively compact and is suitable for mounting on a variety of platforms including small-scale autonomous underwater vehicles to allow the sonar to operate in a similar way to that used by dolphins. In contrast to high-resolution image processing techniques, detection and classification in the wideband system are based on pattern recognition methods applied to the echo spectra. The authors highlight the properties of the transducers needed for such a system indicating how these properties may be exploited to give improved sonar performance. The results obtained from such a system are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of this approach.

Review of learning materials of an ecology course at Universitas Terbuka

“…Providing interesting and practical examples can inspire students to apply ecology concepts in their daily lives and work. Technology is often inspired by natural phenomena such as the submarine sonar system developed from the dolphin sonar (Pailhas et al ., 2012) or sustainable energy sources modeled after the hummingbird-wing structure (Ahmed et al ., 2017). Introducing such examples can help students understand the behavior of living things and ecology values.…”

“…Meanwhile, indepth interviews and trials with 21 selected students revealed that including external resources on printed learning materials was less efficient, as students had to write down one after another. Review of learning materials submarine sonar system developed from the dolphin sonar (Pailhas et al, 2012) or sustainable energy sources modeled after the hummingbird-wing structure (Ahmed et al, 2017).…”

Inspection and monitoring systems subsea pipelines: A review paper

“…161 Advances to this method are partially bioinspired through the observation of dolphins, which also use frequency-rich pulses to obtain information about the environment in order to navigate. 162,163 Using the bioinspired approach, WBS has been recently used to not only inspect the positioning of subsea pipelines, but also provide information on flow assurance (i.e. whether flow is being obstructed by a foreign body).…”

Archives of Acoustics

“…Classification of underwater targets from the acoustic backscattered signals includes discrimination between target and non-target objects as well as the description of background clutter . There are a lot of components that complicate this procedure such as: non-repeatability and alteration of the target signature with aspect angles, ranging and grazing angle , challenging natural and man-made clutter (Pailhas et al, 2012), effects of latitude and longitude (Williams, Fakiris, 2014), highly variable and reverberant working environment (Pan et al, 2014;Zhou, Zhang, 2005), dependency on the water's temperature, the salinity, the depth (Aubry et al, 2012) and the lack of any preknowledge about the form and the geometry of the non-target (Chu, Stanto, 2010).…”