Robust adpative beamforming for triplet sonar arrays

We propose a robust adaptive beamforming algorithm for triplet array sonar. The proposed beamforming algorithm obtains robustness to mismatches, left/right discrimination, and has two steps. The first is a cardioid beamformer, which supports left/right discrimination of target signals. It applies the conventional delay-and-subtract to each triplet’s signal with its rotation angle and obtains multiple cardioid beams. The second is a robust adaptive beamforming to minimize nearby interferences. We regard cardioid beams as input signals of a line array and apply an adaptive beamforming algorithm to the cardioid beams. Simulations results show that the proposed algorithm provides significantly better performance than the conventional algorithms, while supporting left/right discrimination of target signals.