Abstract
The DRDC Atlantic Rapidly Deployable Systems (RDS) project was a major research effort whose purpose was to develop an array system that could be deployed in a few minutes and was capable of detecting and localizing sources of acoustic and electromagnetic energy traveling on or underneath the sea surface. For this system to be functional, the locations of the deployed sensors must be known with considerable accuracy. The three-dimensional sensor positions are obtained using a technique referred to as Array Element Localization (AEL). The AEL process is based on the linearized inversion of the measured arrival time data from a series of controlled impulse sources activated in a pattern around the array. Traditionally, imploding light bulbs are used as the sources. Recently, researchers at the University of Victoria in BC have been investigating the use of ship noise as a source of broadband energy for AEL. Encouraged by these results, ship noise was used to carry out AEL on two RDS bottom-mounted horizontal arrays that were previously localized using light-bulb pops. This paper describes the ship AEL method and presents the results forthose two arrays.