Pitch and yaw effects on very wide swath multibeam sonars

The first multibeam sonar systems, SASS and SEABEAM, offered stabilization for certain ship motions. Sass, a 1° system, incorporated pitch and roll stabilization as part of its original design in the early 1960s. In the mid-1970s, the first commercial multibeam system called SEABEAM followed the same stabilization concepts though its swath was narrower. Now, however, manufacturers are supplying much larger swath widths and some effects that were not very significant in the original multibeam systems are now becoming dominant in data location on very wide swath systems. This paper discusses those effects and some other considerations for wide swath multibeam systems