Over the past year, ASA member and Ph.D. candidate Kyle Dalton has led an ongoing project for building an in-air synthetic aperture sonar (AirSAS) system – all with consumer audio equipment! It is capable of linear and circular geometries and can mimic a variety of real sonars with one system. We have developed software to support synthetic aperture surveys, utilizing LabVIEW for signal acquisition and array control, and MATLAB for signal processing. Soon, Kyle will be presenting on this topic in May at the 186th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, held in Ottawa, Canada!

This project is open to all students, regardless of whether they work in the Penn State Applied Research Laboratory (ARL) or not. Overall, the students who participated in this project have found it to be a very rewarding learning experience. Here are some photos that we took while building the system!