SUMMARY

Finding the direction-of-arrival of an incoming acoustic wave can be done through the process called conventional beamforming.
By repeating this process over time, a source can be spatially and temporally tracked with just an array of receivers.
Using a four-element tetrahedron-shaped array, we characterize the performance of conventional beamforming with this array and how different source signals affect this performance.
This was done in three testing environments: a numerical simulation, the Georgia Tech acoustic water tank, and the Atlantic Ocean.
These tests show that the 13-inch tetrahedron array performs well when source tracking in the 2000 Hz to 5000 Hz band.
Outside of this band, the array does not perform well due to the presence of high energy side lobes that make estimating the direction-of-arrival ambiguous.
In the ocean tests, a towed source was tracked moderately well, with errors in the tracking due to uncertainty in the location and orientation of the array at sea.