Page 38: of Marine Technology Magazine (November 2006)

38 MTR November 2006 that they produce minimum environmental impact.

Build Characteristics

QinetiQ have developed the Cerberus wideband swim- mer detection sonar in response to the challenging requirements defined in the previous section. The devel- opment of this product is based on years of experience of wideband technology, state of the art tracking and classi- fication algorithms. QinetiQ also has a large background knowledge of environmental conditions which affect per- formance, sonar design, build expertise and user interface experience.

Wideband

Cerberus has been designed specifi- cally for the task of tracking divers in hostile conditions. This, together with it's heritage as a 360° wideband sonar that has been derived from decades of underpinning research into the detection, tracking and classifica- tion of low target strength objects, gives the device both an exceptional and unprecedented circular area of coverage per unit and an important full water column coverage in hostile deep and shallow water environmen- tal conditions. Wideband technology is required to counteract the problem of detection of low target strength threats where older CW/narrowband systems have proved inadequate.

While the importance of wideband technology has been known for many years, it is only in recent times that sonar systems have been capable of transmitting/receiving such signals at sufficiently high power to make it worthwhile. The major development in this area has been the underpin- ning enabling technology of 1-3

Piezocomposites, allowing signals of high bandwidth to be transmitted and received.

Open System

The Cerberus System operates on the QinetiQ DeRSCI open architec- ture methodology that has a proven track record on U.K. Royal Navy submarines. The use of such open and scaleable standards simplifies considerably the ease with which systems can be constructed and con- trolled with little or no bespoke engineering.

Adverse Conditions

The design and build of Wideband Cerberus has been such that environmental effects such as adverse sound speed profile are overcome by the use of wideband tech- nology and wide vertical field of view. Figure 4 (pg. 39) shows the importance of the sound speed profile for detection performance with, for this case, the environ- ment producing downward refraction. The Cerberus wideband wide field of view design provides full water

Cerberus OSU and operator display

Figure 1

Illustration of Resolving Power of Wideband Sonar.

Figure 2

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