Dr Benjamin Sherlock

Research Associate

Email: benjamin.sherlock@ncl.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 5286
Address: SEA Lab,
School of Engineering,
Merz Court,
Newcastle University,
Newcastle upon Tyne,
NE1 7RU

Background

Dr. Benjamin Sherlock is a Research Associate in the SEAlab team (School of Engineering) and engineer with 17 years experience in electronics and software engineering covering a wide range of research and development projects. As part of his recent PhD research (2013-2017), he developed bio-friendly acoustic waveforms to minimise the impact on marine mammals whilst still providing low-power and robust communications in the underwater channel. These waveforms were developed further and incorporated in the recent work on the USMART (EP/P017975/1) acoustic modem. He contributed to the design of this modem technology which has since resulted in commercialisation of the technology. He was part of the SONAR team that won the Moonshot Award in the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE in 2019.

Areas of Expertise

Underwater Acoustic Communications, Signal Processing, and Embedded Systems.

Active Projects

Research and Development of NM3 acoustic modems - Low cost, low power underwater acoustic modems for distributed sensor networks and positioning applications. Digital signal processing, ARM microcontrollers, analogue and digital electronics design and manufacture, C and assembler software engineering. https://research.ncl.ac.uk/usmart/

Python drivers and examples for NM3 modems can be found at: https://github.com/bensherlock/nm3-python-driver

Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE TEAM Tao - Part of the Newcastle University SEA Lab team, designing and producing the Sonar system that is integral to the subsea automated vehicles. FPGA and VHDL with digital signal processing, electronics design, PC based C/CPP software engineering. https://www.xprize.org/prizes/ocean-discovery/teams/team_tao

Design of electronics, systems, and software for the SEALab Acoustic Network Gateway Buoy (ANGY). Live streaming hydrophones to the ANGY YouTube Channel (mainly during the lighter months as ANGY is solar powered, but previous recordings are archived on youtube): https://www.youtube.com/angy-sealab . The live stream also featured in the REVEIL2020 24HR Dawn Chorus Stream for International Dawn Chorus 2020.

Selected recordings from ANGY also contributed to an immersive soundscape for World Oceans Day 2020: https://daviddelahaye.co.uk/world-oceans-day-2020/

Academic Qualifications

MEng (Hons) Microelectronics and Software Engineering, Newcastle University, 2003.

PhD Electronic Engineering, Newcastle University, 2018. Thesis title: "Spread-Spectrum Techniques for Environmentally-Friendly Underwater Acoustic Communications".

Research

Full publication listings can be found on Google Scholar.

Publications

Sherlock B, Neasham JA, Tsimenidis CC. Spread-Spectrum Techniques for Bio-Friendly Underwater Acoustic Communications. IEEE Access 2018, 6, 4506-4520.
Sherlock B, Neasham JA, Tsimenidis CC. Implementation of a spread-spectrum acoustic modem on an android mobile device. In: OCEANS 2017 - Aberdeen. 2017, Aberdeen, UK: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Morozs N, Mitchell PD, Zakharov Y, Sherlock B, Neasham JA, Tsimenidis CC, Mourya R, Petillot YR, Gibney T, Dragone M, Sayed ME, McConnell AC, Aracri S, Stokes AA. Robust TDA-MAC for practical underwater sensor network deployment: Lessons from usmart sea trials. In: Proceedings of the Thirteenth ACM International Conference on Underwater Networks & Systems. 2018, Shenzen, China: Association for Computing Machinery.