UUV-3500 Sidescan Sonar Integration in 20 Days
It took engineers at a major manufacturer and supplier of Autonomous/Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (AUV/UUV) working in concert with L-3 Klein engineering by telephone, just 20 days to order, receive, install and integrate L-3 Klein’s UUV-3500 sidescan sonar into their AUV for offshore surveying. The image was collected immediately after integration, using the UUV-3500 sonar at 900kHz. The aircraft is a Northrop N-3PB that crashed off Reykjavik Airport during WWII. The wing deterioration is clearly visible, as is the internal framework.
L-3 Klein’s customer summed up the UUV-3500 ease of integration and performance by commenting that this was the fastest from first phone call to good data from a (sonar) sensor in its history.
To date, the L-3 Klein UUV-3500 sidescan sonar has been successfully integrated into the following Autonomous Underwater Vehicles: Ocean Server-Iver2, Bluefin BF-9 and BF-12, Gavia Offshore Surveyor, Hydroid Remus-600, ECA Robotics Alistar-100, VCT HarborScan as well as a number of others.
The L-3 Klein UUV-3500 product line leverages a wholly FPGA implemented multi-channel processing engine. The sonar engine simultaneously optimises two different and concurrent output data streams for photo quality side scan imagery and high accuracy, co-registered swath bathymetry. The UUV-3500 operates exclusively with L-3 Klein’s proprietary wideband technology providing side scan range and resolution performance in a low power, compact, and lightweight payload. The swath bathymetry option allows for wide swath performance which is typically 10-12 times the overall altitude of the UUV and thereby significantly greater coverage than can be achieved by a multi-beam echo-sounder. Post survey analysis of the data can be accomplished using Klein’s SonarPro software. Alternately, Klein offers a Software Development Kit (SDK) which allows UUV manufacturers and third-party software developers the ability to control the sonar directly as well as display data using Klein’s image display engine.
