We are very excited to announce this new (patent pending) capability of the Omniscan 450 FS sonar. In addition to long range and high resolution imaging, Omniscan can now do motion tracking and position hold!
Cerulean SonarView works great with Omniscan to “mosaic” the sonar image in real time as your vehicle moves, but of course it needs position information to do this. For a surface vessel with GPS this is no problem, but to accomplish the same result underwater on an ROV additional expensive underwater positioning systems are required.
Introducing Omniscan Doppler Motion Tracking
Cerulean engineers have developed a way to get Doppler information from Omniscan pings by interleaving “imaging pings” and “Doppler pings.” “Imaging pings” are the normal pings Omniscan uses to generate the sonar image. The “Doppler pings” are not suitable for imaging, but with special processing of the return echo, Omniscan is able to produce an estimate of the velocity relative to the ping direction.
Check it out! This window is a live embedded version of SonarView replaying an actual Omniscan log file taken on a BlueROV2 five meters below the surface with no GPS, no USBL, no DVL. Just a pair of Omniscan 450 FS imaging sonars, one mounted forward and one on the port side.
Click here to open this SonarView demo full size in new tab
You can get a lot of the capability even with a single Omiscan 450 FS mounted forward. With this single Omniscan configuration you can rotate to do a scan, then move toward any potential sonar targets and SonarView will render the forward motion so you will see your forward progress toward the target on the sonar image.
Add a second Omniscan 450 FS on either side of the ROV and not only do you now have side-scan imaging, but you also have a second axis of velocity information to enable full 2D tracking in SonarView. In addition, the 2D motion tracking information from Omniscan can be used to enable Position Hold mode.
This new patent pending Doppler Motion Tracking feature works on all Omniscan devices already in the field with just firmware and SonarView updates. Position Hold works out of the box with BlueOS/Ardusub based ROVs. Cerulean is available to work with OEMs to integrate in alternative flight control systems.