Guidance of an unmanned underwater vehicle using a passive acoustic threat detection system

Divers and swimmers pose a potential water-side threat to assets in ports and harbors. Developing effective technologies and systems to detect, localize, and classify these threats is critical to protecting those assets. Once a potential threat has been identified, it is necessary to intervene to either deter or further classify a threat. UUVs are a technology that can be employed in this role, but there are challenges associated with re-acquiring a submerged threat with a UUVs sensors. This paper describes an experiment that used an acoustic system that can detect and localize a source and simultaneously steer a UUV to intercept and re-acquire the source.