AMULET: Acoustic Metastructure for Direction-of-Arrival Estimation Underwater Using a Single Hydrophone

Small autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that can perceive and explore the environment at low cost are increasingly being deployed for seafloor mapping and biome sensing. A critical sensing ability that many of the larger submarines possess is to perform directional SONAR using arrays of hydrophones to map the environment. Unfortunately, this ability to identify direction-of-arrival (DoA) remains too inaccurate or even infeasible for the small AUVs due to size, weight, and power (SWaP) constraints. This paper presents a new opportunity in augmenting this critical ability using a single hydrophone.