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Manatee Finder Project |
Project Goal
The Manatee Finder project was established to develop an active sonar system that would detect, and then alert boaters, to the presence of manatees in the area. The project was strongly motived by the fact that nearly 1/3 of all manatee deaths each year are caused by interactions with boats. Given the severity of the problem, other solutions had been previously proposed which either used passive detection methods, or in one case, noise deterent methods. This project was the first to apply active sonar principles to the manatee detection problem.
Given the complicated nature of the Florida waterways with respect to the acoustic environment, the first step in the project aimed to characterize the acoustic properties of the manatee. The acoustic properties of any scatterer can be best summarized by its Target Strength which is in essence, a frequency and orientation dependent quantity which specifies the fraction of sound incident on the scatter that is reflected back to the receiver. To accomplish this first step, a group of five male manatees housed at Sea World San Diego were studied both behaviorally and acoustically to better understand the applicability of the proposed active sonar system to the manatee detection problem.
General Specifications
The main elements of the system are: Two 171KHz sidescan transducers, one underwater video camera, two preamps with high pass filters, and a data acquisition system running LabVIEW. Additional components were used to mount the system in the facility at SeaWorld. The sidescans were oriented in a cross pattern to give the narrowest field of view possible with the system. The video camera was then mounted to be nearly coaxial with the center axis of the two transducers.
| Principal Investigators |
Dr. Jules Jaffe and Dr. Ann Bowles |
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| Chief Engineer |
F. Simonet |
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| Software Development |
Paul Roberts - Data acquisition,GUI, and algorithms |
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| Research Assistants |
Tina Yack, Jennifer Keating |
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| Students |
Heather Albert |
Development Pictures/Movies/Data
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Pictures/Videos
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Graphical rendering of the calibration setup
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Project Goals
Video of Dr. Jaffe describing the project goals. |
Project Desc.
Video of Dr. Jaffe giving a description of the project and experiments. |
Manatee Expert
Video of Ann Bowles, an expert on manatees from Hubbs-Sea World Research Institute. |
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Data
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Image data showing different views used to localize the manatee in the sonar field of view. |
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Acoustic Data showing a reflection around 1.1 meters |
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Histogram of manatee Target Strength. |
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Beam patterns from tank calibration |
