Environmental services embedded on Maritime Unmanned Systems for ASW decision support

In recent work [1] the authors evaluated the effectiveness of using embedded on board ASW decision support services as a means to increase the effectiveness of autonomous area search. An area search metric based on a cumulative probability of detection grid was developed that was robust to moving targets and which exploited a priori knowledge of the environment. Results showed that the proposed environmentally sensitive search yielded a higher measure of effectiveness in comparison to a simple search pattern that did not exploit information made available by an embedded environmentally sensitive ASW decision support service.In order to exploit environmental services for environments where the relevant parameters affecting acoustic propagation and scattering are not available, the development of a dedicated set of environmental services that provide the environmental parameters required is of high interest. In this paper we evaluate the possibility to extract an estimate of the bottom scattering strength from the measurements assuming complete knowledge of all other parameters.