Exploratory development minehunting sensors for unmanned vehicles

This paper describes the technology goals and progress to date for the Office of Naval Research (ONR) exploratory development programs addressing sea mine reconnaissance and minehunting technology. These programs are developing a suite of sensors and associated signal/image processing for reconnaissance and hunting against all mine types (including buried mines) in water depths from deep water to very shallow water. The sensor technology prototypes are being developed in a modular configuration to allow deployment from a 21 inch diameter unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV). For the shallow water and deep water threat of volume mines and bottom mines, a toroidal volume search sonar and an advanced side-looking sonar are being developed. Advanced signal processing technologies were developed and evaluated using the sea test data. In order to identify targets which have been classified as mine-like, an underwater electro-optic sensor has been developed and tested. Images of targets can be collected at ranges greater than five times conventional cameras.