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Successful Sea Trials For ECA GROUP’s UMISAS Sonar

: Feb 17, 2021 - : 11:20 am

ECA Group’s UMISAS sonar has completed a series of sea trials  in preparation of its integration in AUVs and Towed Sonars for the mine Countermeasures replacement program of the Belgian and Royal Netherlands navies.

The sea trials of the UMISAS sonar for both the AUVs and Towed Sonars of the rMCM program took place in the second half of 2020 as part of the program to replace the naval Mine Countermeasures capability of the Belgian and Royal Netherlands navies, which includes the supply of twelve minehunters equipped with unmanned systems (Toolbox). The next step is the on-going production of the UMISAS sonars for their integration in the A18-M and T18-M adapted to the rMCM program. The integration will take place between October this year and March 2022.

The A18-M AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) and T18-M Towed Sonar have the best performance when fitted with UMISAS sonars. Thus, these drones are exclusively commercialized with UMISAS sonars. The A18-M is an underwater drone capable to carry out missions requiring long operating endurance (up to 24 hours), up to 300 meters underwater depth. It is able to host high-performance sonar payloads, such as synthetic aperture sonar (SAS), which provides unprecedented performance.

T18-M is a self-powered towed interferometric synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) for Real Time Detection, Classification and Mapping (SCM) of seabed and moored mines. It is equipped with a thinner umbilical cable and lighter equipment for easier deployment from a USV or another platform. It is a towed vehicle derived from the A18-M. It is specifically designed to meet all recommendations related to mine warfare operations (particularly the detection or classification phases).

ECA Group’s research and development in the field of sonars started back in 2014 together with its development of new generation Autonomous Underwater Vehicles in the A18 range. The company brings to the market its own sonar technology to be fitted on its naval drones and fully integrated into its unmanned systems.

The UMISAS sonars are interferometric synthetic aperture sonars (InSAS) used for mine detection missions as part of Mine Countermeasures operations at sea. The UMISAS sonars aim to obtain a spatial resolution of about 3 cm x 3 cm to optimally classify small and irregularly shaped objects on the seabed.

The positioning of the platform required to form the synthetic antennas is an integral part of the UMISAS processing chain. UMISAS directly uses the data from the A18-M or T18-M navigation grade inertial unit to perform SAS processing, thus eliminating the use of low-cost navigation sensors used by some commercial SAS systems on the market that perform only the short term navigation required to produce focused SAS imagery, but do not allow for geo-referencing of the SAS images or improved positioning of the AUV by exploiting the SAS and, above all, are much less reliable.

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