Feasibility Study on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Based Undersea Acoustic Sensing

Peter C Chu* and Loney R Cason

Abstract

An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system with hybrid air-water quadcopter platform, named AquaQuad, was developed in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Naval Postgraduate School. It can land on ocean surface with different sea-states for communication and provide undersea passive acoustic sensing. This study shows that the AquaQuad is an alternative equipment to sonobuoy in undersea acoustic sensing and detection.