While marine animal behavior is often studied in constrained lab setups, a more reliable exploration should be done in their natural environment and without human interference. This task becomes excessively more challenging when quantitative data are needed in large and unconstrained aquatic environments. Toward that end, researchers widely use acoustic positioning telemetry to remotely track their subjects, though this often requires an extensive network of receivers placed in the environment ahead of time. This study proposes a new tracking method that continuously tracks and reports the trajectory of a target in unconstrained marine environments using a single‐moving acoustic receiver. Instead of deploying an extensive array of static receivers, we use a single receiver mounted on an autonomous surface vehicle to obtain highly accurate results with much cheaper and simpler means. The receiver position and earlier target location estimations are used to calculate an optimal trajectory for the receiver, which in turn provides subsequent readings and target localizations based on a new variant of the Time Difference of Arrival approach. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed methods using both simulations and field experiments.

中文翻译：

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使用单个自主表面接收器对移动海洋目标进行声学跟踪

虽然海洋动物的行为通常是在有限的实验室设置中进行研究，但更可靠的探索应该在它们的自然环境中进行，并且不受人类干扰。当在大型且不受约束的水生环境中需要定量数据时，这项任务变得更加具有挑战性。为此，研究人员广泛使用声学定位遥测技术来远程跟踪他们的受试者，尽管这通常需要提前在环境中放置广泛的接收器网络。本研究提出了一种新的跟踪方法，该方法使用无约束的海洋环境中连续跟踪和报告目标的轨迹单动式声学接收器。我们没有部署大量的静态接收器，而是使用安装在自主地面车辆上的单个接收器，以更便宜、更简单的方式获得高精度结果。接收器位置和早期目标位置估计用于计算接收器的最佳轨迹，这反过来又基于到达时间差方法的新变体提供后续读数和目标定位。我们使用模拟和现场实验证明了所提出方法的性能。