Design and Experimental Study of Underwater Inflatable Co-prime Sonar Array (UICSA)

Underwater Inflatable Co-prime Sonar Array (UICSA) is a compact array assembly, which upon deployment in the ocean expands to its predetermined length and acquires sensing data. The UICSA employs an inflatable array support structure, which can be compressed into a compact package. The employed the sparse array configuration - co-prime array also reduces the number of sensors typically required for a uniform linear configuration. With the "two-way compression", storing, handling, and transporting the compactly designed UICSA system is convenient, particularly for the autonomous vehicles with limited payload space. In this paper, we propose four designs of UICSA based on different support structure constructions. We fabricated the prototypes and deployed them in an acoustic test tank. The experimental data were analyzed to evaluate the system performance. The results validate the capability of the UICSA for direction finding and also reveal that the underwater inflatable structure as a platform can have broad prospects in the ocean-related applications.