6/23/08

3 Phoenix, Inc. (3Pi) was awarded a Phase I Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) project by the Office of Naval research (ONR) under Navy topic N08-T029, “Novel Fiber Optic Methods for Sensing Shape, Orientation and/or Heading of Undersea Arrays and Tethers”. 3Pi is applying the techniques of shape reconstruction based upon discrete point sensing technologies to flexible sonar structures. The Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) system proposed for this effort requires sub-meter sensing over a distance exceeding 5 km and accurate representation of 3-dimensional linear displacements as well as torsion. Through iterative expansion and extension of the trained network approach developed under Topic AF06-273, a generalized technique will be developed that can be used for shape reconstruction of short Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) tethers to very long towed sonar arrays.