Direction of Arrival Estimation of Acoustic Sources with Unmanned Underwater Vehicle Swarm via Matrix Completion

Abstract

With the rapid development of vibration and noise reduction technologies, underwater target detection is facing great challenges. Particularly, the task of high-resolution direction of arrival (DOA) estimation with sonar array is becoming more and more tough. In recent years, unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) have been developed considerably, with the improvements of target localization performance in terms of adaptability, detection range, operation efficiency, and anti-interference ability. Nevertheless, in general, the size of UUV is small such that current passive sonar systems usually have relatively limited localization accuracy, detection distance, and environmental robustness in complex ocean noise. This motivates us to present a new approach to construct a large-aperture virtual array with multiple small-aperture arrays of unmanned underwater vehicle swarm (UUVS) which consists of multiple UUVs in this paper. However, for the UUVS array, the received data could suffer from unobserved and corrupted samples. This makes it challenging to analyze and process large-aperture array data. Towards this end, the matrix completion technique is employed to recover the unobserved and corrupted data for virtual array construction based on the low rank property of array data matrix. The recovered matrix is then exploited for underwater target bearing estimation using the traditional DOA estimation approach. Numerical results verify that the proposed method is capable of detecting underwater targets with high precision and resolution.