Review of Autonomous Undersea Vehicle (AUV) Developments 
The development imperative is to improve the gains of sonar devices to enable the detection of potentially 
hostile submarines that will be characterized by low source levels and target strengths. Sonars have 
evolved continuously from a few bulky sensors with analog signal processing to arrays with hundreds of 
miniaturized sensors and high-speed digital signal processing. The understanding of oceanography has 
grown from the discovery of propagation channels in the ocean to the development of accurate, range- 
dependent propagation codes and environmental models for noise and reverberation. Similarly, reliable 
and smart sensing systems can now be deployed using advances in ocean engineering, a lot of hard-won 
field experience, and rugged very-large-scale integration (VLSI) electronics. This evolution has been 
scientifically and technologically intensive; at this point, the easily attainable performance gains have 
been achieved, and even greater exploitation of the science and technology will be required in order to 
develop future systems that incorporate significant performance gains. 
The necessary components of an effective ASW technology development program are as follows: 
e Well-posed science and technology; 
e At-sea experiments with sensors that are both well calibrated and accurately navigated to provide 
real-time environmental data; 
e Fundamental exploitation of the advances in ocean acoustics, oceanography, and signal 
processing; 
e Robust ocean engineering for their deployment; 
e Integration of communications, navigation, and high-speed computation; and 
e Highly trained operators. " 
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