Remote Monitoring of the Calibration of a System of Tracking Arrays

Post-test analysis of vehicle tracking data taken from a three-dimensional underwater range requires the splicing together of several pieces of track individually produced by distinct transducer arrays. The location and orientation of the arrays must be known precisely in order to convert locally determined track into a coherent record in the general range coordinate system. The maintenance of calibration of the system is a problem and the paper produces some least square methodology that uses the tracking data itself to monitor it. More specifically, algorithms are developed to estimate array displacement and orientation corrections. Since such corrections must be relative to a specific array, methodology is presented to help identify the more stable arrays.