Wavefront held a well-received live demo of its latest generation of Sentinel IDS Intruder Detection Sonar at Portland Harbor in Dorset on the South Coast of England.
Not only could Sentinel’s latest developments be explored but also in-person discussions could be held on specific scenarios and ConOps of relevance to the company’s audience. Live demonstrations allow potential customers and partners to witness at first hand the power of intruder detection sonar in a relevant, real-world situation.
Guests from a select range of industry partners as well as existing customers were invited to join Wavefront for morning or afternoon sessions during a week of back-to-back live Sentinel IDS in-water performance demos. A multi-head Sentinel system was installed comprising two seabed fixed heads deployed manually from a RIB and a third head operating from a mobile deployment raft.
During the demo days in Portland, Sentinel was put through its paces in various weather conditions in a busy commercial harbor. The company demonstrated many of the latest developments featured in the May 2024 Sentinel software release, including:
- Multiple head deployment with Sentinel’s sophisticated Super Inheritance tracking across sonar heads;
- Integration of Bearing And Range To Target (BARTT) with a mobile device to deliver target location and tracking data to mobile personnel in real-time; and
- Active Passive Track Correlation (APTC) with onscreen marker for more rapid threat evaluation.
Also, on display were:
- Deployment Raft – Designed to enable Sentinel IDS mobilisation where no suitable infrastructure exists or rapid deployment is critical.
- Command Trailer – designed to act as Central command trailer for multiple Expeditionary Trailers which enable Sentinel IDS deployments in places where no infrastructure exists or rapid deployment is essential.
Other Key Features of Sentinel IDS
SInAPS (Simultaneous In-band Active and Passive Sonar)
SInAPS® technology, unique to Wavefront, combines the detection and tracking capabilities of active and passive sonar. SInAPS® draws on the use of both active and passive sonar technologies when tracking low-target-strength drones or very slow-moving targets in highly cluttered seabed conditions, typical of some harbor settings.
Without compromising the active tracker, SInAPS uses the processing gain of the Sentinel array, along with its high bearing resolution, to simultaneously passively track targets. SInAPS then combines the spatially co-registered output from the active and passive trackers.SInAPS’ real power lies in its ability to classify and establish threats that would have previously taken much longer to identify. Imagine a situation where a small drone is moving under the cover of a harbor wall; a challenge for any active system.
The use of passive sonar allows Sentinel to correlate mechanical noise and intermittent detections to immediately establish the presence of a threat. This reduces alert time and increases response time. Once detected, a passive track that is correlated to an active track (using the latest APTC feature), is immediately flagged as ‘Severe’ and an on onscreen marker appears showing the correlated detections.
Super-Inheritance
Super-Inheritance allows Sentinel to maintain a single track across multiple sonar heads or indeed to stitch together multiple partial tracks into an unbroken track. When a target becomes lost in the noise and reappears again, either within the same Sentinel Head or a different Sentinel Head on the same system, the algorithms can determine its single track and stitch the partial tracks together.
Zoom Window with ultra-fast local history video replay
The Zoom Window shows active sonar target imagery produced using full resolution processing. This is at much higher fidelity than the imagery in the active Plan Position Indicator (PPI), which is the standard large area 2D display in Sentinel showing range and bearing.
The detail shown in the Zoom Window over the latest frames can be played using Wavefront’s unique local history replay video mode at many times real-time and can help the user to classify the target. If selected it can automatically track the threat.
