Bo'sun, a high resolution automatic charting system for the continental shelf

BO'SUN comprises hardware and software for generating, recording, and processing high resolution sonar data to produce contoured depth charts in depths to 2, 000 feet. The hardware includes a multibeam acoustic depth sounder, CRT display, digital printer, and digital magnetic tape recorder which logs both sonar and navigation data. The software permits shore processing of the magnetic tape on a conventional general purpose computer and digital plotter to develop annotated contour charts with selectable scale and contour interval. The 21 beam version of BO'SUN has a lateral sweep of 105 and logs 11 soundings on each transmission. The magnetic tape records the sonar slant range, time, roll, heading, and navigation range-range coordinates. The software computes exact position and depth for each sounding, correcting for sound velocity, refraction, roll, tide, compass deviation, ship's coordinates and location of transducer relative to ship's navigation center. There is provision for editing, averaging, interpolating, and smoothing. Survey runs of any geometry including overlapping swaths are han-died by sort and merge routines which collect all data available at each grid point. A sophisticated navigation editor has been developed to cope with erratic electromagnetic propagation. A plot of ship's track can be run before and after editing.