Low-Size and Cost Acoustic Buoy for Autonomous Vessel Detection

Achieving maritime domain awareness through the deployment of many low-cost, low-power sensors to monitor large ocean areas has become an international trend [1], [2], an approach known as “Ocean of Things” (OoT). The STAR Center at Stevens Institute of Technology is currently developing a sensor contained in a small, rapidly deployable “smart” buoy for automated detection of vessels by their underwater acoustic signatures. Designed with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components and materials, multiple such buoys can work together to form a large, distributed sensor network, periodically communicating data to a command center for analysis. Marine-traffic monitoring is of particular interest in areas where small-boat traffic is a security concern, but many existing systems for detecting such vessels can be difficult to deploy. The buoy is based on in-house manufactured hydrophones. Processing is performed on an ARM Cortex-M7 microcontroller. Methods were developed based on numerous past data collections by the Stevens Institute of Technology.