Acoustic Telemetry Buoy Array: TDOA 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 simulator renders that array in 3D — buoys floating on the surface, a tagged animal swimming below, and expanding ping wavefronts you can watch race outward at the real speed of sound in water. 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, 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.