Comments: download pdf.
Ref.: in IEEE/OES COA'2016, Harbin (China), 9-11 January 2016.
Abstract:
Seismic inversion with an AUV-based sensor array system is an appealing concept that opens up a number of
interesting possibilities but faces also a number of technological and scientific challenges. Among the
technological challenges there is the fact that sensor arrays are no longer hardwired to the tow ship and
therefore on the fly data monitoring imposes stringent restrictions on the amount of data that can be sent
to the support ship. One of the scientific challenges is to determine the optimal sensor array configuration
by exploring AUV mobility for inverting the bottom geophysical structure of interest. In fact, the
industry standard planar array and the associated acoustic data processing may not be the setup with the
highest performance for each scenario at hand. Generic optimization of sensor distribution through space
has been a long standing problem to which there are no closed form solutions. Generically speaking, field
diversity maximization is often referred to as a criteria for sensor positioning. This work explores data
incoherence as a possible criteria to derive performance of distributed sensor arrays. Additional technological
limitations such as array aperture, number of sensors and distances between vehicles impose additional
constraints leading to suboptimal configurations. Compressed sensing array processing is used both
explore data incoherence and to offer data reduction for alleviating on the fly monitoring.