Localization of Southern Resident Killer Whales Using Two Star Arrays to Support Marine Renewable Energy
Tidal power has been identified as one of the most potential commercial-scale renewable energy sources. Puget Sound, Washington, is a potential site to deploy tidal power generating devices. The risk of injury for killer whales needs to be managed before the deployment of these types of devices can be approved by regulating authorities. A passive acoustic system consisting of two star arrays, each with four hydrophones, was designed and implemented for the detection and localization of Southern Resident killer whales. Deployment of the passive acoustic system was conducted at Sequim Bay, Washington. A total of nine test locations were chosen, within a radius of 250 m around the star arrays, to test our localization approach. For the localization algorithm, a least square solver was applied to obtain a bearing location from each star array. The final source location was determined by the intersection of the bearings given by each of the two star arrays. Bearing and distance errors were obtained to conduct comparison between the calculated and true (from Global Positioning System) locations. The results indicated that bearing errors were within 1.04º for eight of the test locations; one location had bearing errors slightly larger than expected due to the strong background noise at that position. For the distance errors, six of the test locations were within the range of 1.91 to 32.36 m. The other two test locations were near the intersection line between the centers of the two star arrays, which were expected to have large errors from the theoretical sensitivity analysis performed.
- Research Organization:
- Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-76RL01830
- OSTI ID:
- 1078015
- Report Number(s):
- PNNL-SA-90424; PP0814000
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: OCEANS 2012 MTS/IEEE, October 14-19, 2012, Hampton Roads, Virginia
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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