TDOA Buoy Array 2D: Hyperbolic Wildlife Localization

A robotic hydrophone buoy array is one of the core tools of ecological robotics for marine monitoring: instead of chasing a tagged fish, turtle or marine mammal with a boat, a fixed or drifting array of autonomous acoustic receivers listens for the animal's tag pings and computes its position from nothing but arrival-time differences. This top-down 2D simulator renders the array exactly as an engineer would plan it on a chart — buoys around a mooring circle, a tagged animal swimming through the array, expanding ping wavefronts racing outward at the real speed of sound in water, and the actual hyperbola branch each buoy pair's range-difference measurement defines. Every time all buoys have registered a ping, a live Gauss-Newton least-squares solver turns the raw time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) measurements into a position fix — its iteration path is traced on the map and charted below — and you can dial in buoy count, sound speed, clock jitter and animal speed to see exactly how each parameter degrades or sharpens the estimate.