Lessons learned in developing a distributed in-air ensonification and sensing lab test bed

In recent years, the use of commercial off-the-shelf audio acoustic hardware has been leveraged in the sonar community to emulate in-water sonar acquisitions in a controlled lab environment to benefit research and student education. In-air sonar test beds offer the opportunity to quickly create experimental data which would be costly and time consuming if done in-water. Tests may include different source receiver configurations (monostatic, bistatic, and multistatic) or experimentation with diverse materials and waveforms. Accurate positioning measurements result in the ability to create synthetic aperture imagery. The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) has developed the Distributed In-air Ensonification & Sensing Lab (DIESEL) testbed to contribute to collaboration and dataset generation for the mutual benefit of dataset sharing in the sonar community. There are several critical aspects of test bed development that must be evaluated and verified to bridge the gap between in-air acoustics and in-water sonar simulation and ensure proper system functioning. To further community collaboration and education in this area, this talk will discuss some of the lessons learned from challenges in setting up hardware, debugging aliasing, mitigating noise, and room artifacts and modifying signal processing for sonar dataset simulation in monostatic, multistatic, and bistatic acoustic configurations.