Related 6G Products

Fusion LBL

Ranger 2

Marksman LUSBL

In 2010, Sonardyne introduced its Sixth Generation (6G®) acoustic positioning product range.

6G is simple and intuitive to operate, reducing the need for skilled operators thereby reducing risk. New acoustic instruments enable faster and more efficient solutions for applications such as spool piece metrology and structure placement, so reducing vessel time. Equipment flexibility and longer battery life enables seabed reference transponders to be semi-permanently deployed thereby reducing total deployment costs and enabling multiple users to undertake simultaneous operations.

Cost savings are generated through the flexibility offered by the system components which can be used by a range of different but compatible systems for different operations.

The 6G product family is already comprehensive and although there is a limited level of backward compatibility with current systems, the full benefits of the new technology can only be realised when using exclusively 6G® equipment.

At the core of the new range of 6G transponders and transceivers is Sonardyne Wideband® 2 which utilises ultra-wide bandwidth signals offering faster and more robust transmission of data, more precise ranging and mitigation from multipath in shallow water and amongst steel structures in deepwater.

Sonardyne Wideband 2 offers greater immunity to ROV and vessel noise, less interference to other acoustic systems and great immunity to interference from others. This, combined with a dramatic improvement in the acoustic navigation and telemetry architecture, enables a host of improvements to the way instruments are setup and operated. This simplifies and speeds up operations and reduces the necessary skill base of the users. .

Key Features of 6G and Wideband 2

• High Speed

Data acquisition time using Sonardyne Wideband 2 signals is dramatically shorter for both transponder calibration and measurement phases. Ranges, diagnostics and sensor data is acquired simultaneously to multiple 6G® instruments in a fraction of the time previously taken.

• Accuracy

6G and Sonardyne Wideband 2 technology offers improved accuracy and precision thereby extending the depth to which USBL positioning operations can be conducted or extending metrology LBL capability.

• Autonomous Mode

6G transponders can be programmed to operate autonomously without any control or commanding from an ROV or vessel. Acoustic ranges and sensor data can be programmed to be acquired a specific intervals and logged internally. This can then be recovered using high speed acoustic telemetry.

• Depth Rating

Whether you are working in just a few metres of water or are exploring the deepest oceans of the world, Sonardyne’s expertise in electronic and mechanical engineering ensures our products can withstand the pressure of your application.

• Size

Size and weight are key consideration when space on a ROV, AUV or sensor platform is at a premium. 6G subsea instruments are designed to be the smallest and most robust they can be whilst offering you the performance and flexibility your application demands.

• Range

Sonardyne’s deep ocean positioning systems have a proven operational range in excess of 6,000 metres, enough for the longest tracking operations. Sonardyne Wideband 2 signals enable operation over greater distances by utilising signals with greater energy content.

• Battery Life

Do more for longer. 6G products are designed using the latest low power electronic architecture saving owners time and money by not having to recover equipment to recharge or replace battery packs.

• Acoustic Output

Sonardyne Wideband 2 signals can have twice the bandwidth of current Sonardyne Wideband® 1 signals which delivers significantly more signal-to-noise ratio for the same transmitted output power.

• Multiple Target Tracking

Sonardyne 6G USBL systems can track almost unlimited targets simultaneously. With the ‘ping stacking’ software feature enabled, one second position updates can be achieved independent of water depth. LBL arrays can also be shared by many targets.

• Modem Mode

Sonardyne Wideband 2 enabled instruments have a full acoustic modem capability; medium speed for subsea-to-subsea communications and high speed for subsea-to-surface communications. The advanced Wideband telemetry is designed to be highly adaptive to ensure robust performance even in difficult long shallow water channels.

Related Inertial Products

DP-INS

SPRINT

Lodestar

Sonardyne introduced Lodestar in 2007 as a premium quality Attitude Heading Reference System (AHRS). Using the same proven hardware platform, Lodestar Inertial Navigation Systems (INS) are now available for both surface vessel and subsea vehicle applications.

On its own, inertial navigation is completely self-contained and inherently robust. It provides continuous output with very good short-term accuracy but drift in the longer term. In contrast, acoustic positioning systems have higher position noise and a risk of potential drop-outs but provide excellent long-term stability. Blending these characteristics into a single, tightly integrated solution improves position accuracy, precision and integrity in any water depth while reducing operational time and vessel costs.

• Inertial Navigation for Dynamic Postioning

To comply with safety regulations, many deep water drilling rigs require three independent position reference inputs for their Dynamic Positioning (DP) system.

Traditionally vessels have relied upon a combination of Long and Ultra-Short BaseLine acoustics and two separate GPS systems as the source of these inputs. However in low latitudes (the problem being particularly acute around equatorial regions and during periods of high solar activity) GPS signals are vulnerable to outages from scintillation due to ionospheric irregularities.

The requirement therefore exists for a new independent reference to be made available. DP-INS Sonardyne’s innovative DP-INS (Inertial Navigation System) addresses this need. It seamlessly combines the long term accuracy and precision of Sonardyne’s Wideband 2 acoustic signal technology with the continuous output and fast update rate of high grade inertial sensors.

The single navigation solution that is computed offers complete independence from GPS and an ability to ‘ride through’ acoustic problems such as aeration and noise disruptions.

In addition to operational safety improvements, DP inertial positioning delivers other key benefits. Cost efficiencies are made as there is only need to use a single transponder instead of a full seabed array. This significantly reduces the set-up time following arrival on location yet still offers the same accuracy as LUSBL (which would generally need an array of five transponders).

Additionally, the DP-INS runs at a slower acoustic update rate, which saves transponder battery life. Traditionally with LUSBL, update rates are once every 1-5 seconds; with a DP-INS installed, it is once a second or faster with infrequent aiding from the seabed transponder.

The simple-to-use operator interface displays both the vessel’s LUSBL or USBL position and the INS position in an intuitive format alongside essential status information. The display gives the system operator access to all the information required to monitor DP-INS performance without significantly increasing their workload.

• Inertial Navigation for Subsea Vehicles

SPRINT is Sonardyne's Lodestar-based INS solution for subsea vehicles.

The system extends the operating limits of Ultra-Short BaseLine (USBL) and can dramatically improve the operational efficiency of Long BaseLine (LBL) by using sparse arrays. SPRINT makes optimal use of acoustic aiding data from acoustic positioning and other sensors such as Doppler velocity log (DVL) and pressure sensors. This improves position accuracy, precision and integrity in any water depth while reducing operational time and vessel costs.

The seamless integration of acoustics and inertial technologies exploits the long term accuracy and precision characteristics of acoustic positioning with the continuous availability and fast update rate of state-of-the-art inertial sensors. A single navigation solution is computed and output to a display with intuitive status and quality metrics. Standard output telegrams are available for ROV and Survey company use.

The additional integrity offered by Inertial integration significantly reduces operational delays during periods of challenging subsea acoustic conditions such as aeration and noise. The precision and update rate of the output allows greater subsea vehicle control and is suitable as an ROV station keeping input. SPRINT can be aided by USBL or LBL acoustic inputs. The USBL aiding is vendor independent when using a standard position message or can be tightly coupled to a Sonardyne Marksman or Ranger 2 to optimise performance. Alternatively, LBL aiding can be from a sparse array of one or two beacons only.

Related Communications Products

Autonomous Monitoring System

BOP Control System

Data Logger System

AvTrak 6

Until very recently, subsea sensor systems relied exclusively on marine cables to provide communications and power to each instrument. Despite the fact that subsea cables are notoriously expensive to install and vulnerable to damage, there was no viable wireless alternative that could be relied upon to deliver error-free data to the surface in a timely manner.

Today, the story is very different. Innovations such as Sonardyne’s 6G technology mean that wireless subsea instruments are rapidly becoming mainstream items due to their versatility and cost effectiveness for sensor data acquisition and long term monitoring roles. They offer high precision, accuracy and long term repeatability; important considerations as many physical phenomena in the subsea world are tiny in magnitude, slow to change and require a good deal of patience from those who require access to the data.

The fundamental component of these systems is the seabed deployed acoustic transponder. A unit such as Sonardyne’s Compatt 6 is a small, highly reliable and extremely low power instrument capable of precisely measuring ranges to neighbouring units, acquiring and logging a variety of sensor data and then transmitting it on command to the surface.

The DSP in each Sonardyne transponder is tightly coupled to all electronic sub-systems. It deals with every aspect of the instrument’s operation from controlling efficient usage of battery power, interfacing with internal and external sensors and most important, supporting integrated wireless communications without requiring a separate external acoustic modem to provide this function.

It is this tight integration between power management, sensors, acoustic systems and instrument mechanics that makes Sonardyne’s latest 6G® transponders extremely versatile, reliable and energy efficient. From an acoustics perspective however, the subsea environment is fickle, with problems such as high levels of ambient noise, acoustic refraction due to non-constant sound velocities and hard surfaces causing acoustic reflections (multipath propagation).

Sonardyne has attention towards determining the best signalling schemes, frequencies and transducer configurations to suit robust communications in a wide variety of acoustic environments. Our latest generation of wideband communications schemes support data rates as high as 10,000 bits per second for use when the environment is relatively benign, reducing in discrete intervals to 100 bits per second for the most complex of acoustic conditions. This flexibility ensures communication is achieved at the highest rate possible for any given environment whilst still maintaining error-free data transmission.

Related Sonar Products

Sentinel IDS

Solstice Side Scan

Sentinel Diver Detection Sonar

Sentinel is thought to be the smallest, lightest and most cost-effective diver detection sonar currently available and has been selected by the US Navy and other high profile customers in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia to protect commercial property, strategic infrastructure, coastal zones, ports and harbours, VIPs and military installations.

The reliable detection of underwater targets and their discrimination from marine mammals is a notoriously difficult problem. Sentinel overcomes this challenge by combining state-of-the-art sonar technology, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) processing units and automated detection, classification and tracking software.

The system has shown a 100 per cent success rate in detecting targets at long ranges and in differentiating between divers, surface swimmers and non-threats such as pleasure craft, large fish and cetaceans. This minimises false alarms and reduces the dangerous tension that these can generate.

Solstice Sidescan Sonar

Solstice is the latest product to emerge from Sonardyne Wavefront Ltd. The new sonar has been specifically developed to provide new levels of performance that meet the needs of operators of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) for power consumption and class-leading range and imagery including co-registered bathymetry.

With a total power budget of less than 12W, Solstice can provide high area coverage rates and long endurance. All processing is carried out onboard the vehicle, greatly reducing analysis time when the vehicle is recovered, and allowing onboard data interpretation during the survey.

The capabilities of the new Solstice are expected to make it attractive for a wide range of applications besides survey. These can include mine warfare, harbour protection and also search and recovery.

Solstice has several unique technologies designed to provide the user with class-leading imagery. Amongst these are Multipath Suppression Array Technology (MSAT), Pixel Perfect Imaging (P2I) and Real Time Auto Calibration (RTAC).

The loss of contrast due to reverberation and multipath, common to even the best of the previous generation of sidescans – particularly in shallow water – is mitigated by Solstice’s innovative Multipath Suppression Array Technology (MSAT). This technology has been developed to overcome the trade-off between multi-path suppression at longer ranges, and wide elevation coverage at short ranges. MSAT offers a unique combination of the two and provides high shadow contrast right out to the maximum range of the sensor whilst maintaining high quality imagery close to nadir. The ability to recognise shape from acoustic shadows cast by objects on the sea floor is a powerful classification tool and the capabilities of Solstice to deliver high shadow contrast throughout its range is an important benefit for many applications.

Solstice now provides the ultimate in high-fidelity focus by providing unique Pixel Perfect Imaging (P2I)on a 1-inch by 1-inch grid enveloping the entire sea floor within the sensor’s field of view. Solstice uses an entirely new approach known as Classification Optimised Focused Imaging (COFI) that subtly varies the details of the signal processing at every individual pixel in the image to optimise classification performance. The Solstice real-time onboard processor is capable of addressing up to 3.1 Mega pixels every second which means that the image will maintain the best focus and resolution possible at that position in space relative to the sensor. At longer ranges where the spatial sampling rate significantly exceeds the resolution, the interpolated real-time imagery dramatically aids human ability to recognise the target. Uniquely, P2I also guarantees 100% sea-floor coverage due to its ability to track intra-frame motion during image formation. The associated local micro-mosaicing also ensures the sea-floor imagery is geometrically undistorted by the platform dynamics.

Despite being designed to be physically compact, the high operating frequency of Solstice (750 kHz) means that the array is still over 300 wavelengths in extent. To maintain the acoustic linearity of this array necessary for class-leading imagery, Solstice also includes Real Time Auto Calibration (RTAC) which dynamically re-phases each individual hydrophone element seven times a second to compensate for any dynamic strains that might cause array misalignment.