A bat-like sonar system consisting of hardware digital correlators

A prototype bat-like sonar system has been developed by implementing some of the bat techniques for interpreting sonar signals and mimicking their sensor configuration. The optimum method for estimating time-of-flight from the frequency-modulated echoes is correlation detection. In the field of photon correlation spectroscopy, a hardware digital correlator is employed to process the correlation function in real time. The paper presents an application of hardware digital correlators, implemented on a programmable logic device, as sonar signal processing systems for obstacle localization.