Abstract: Taking advantage of the lateral line organ, fish can navigate, feed, and avoid predators and obstacles by sensing surrounding flow fields. The lateral line organ provides an important reference for the development of new underwater detection technology. Inspired by the lateral line organ, in this paper, for the sake of localizing the target dipole source in three-dimensional underwater space, an artificial lateral line consisting of nine underwater pressure sensors forming a cross-shaped sensor array is applied. Combined with the method of gener-alized regression neural network, which is suitable for solving nonlinear pattern recognition problems, a corresponding experimental platform has been built to sample data for training the neural network from a 12 cm by 12 cm by 24 cm cuboid space. The experimental results indicate that the cross-shaped artificial lateral line can localize the target dipole source two body-lengths away. The well-performing perceptual distance is below 13 cm away from the sensing array. Moreover, decreasing the data sampling interval and in-creasing the number of sensors utilized can help improve the positioning accuracy.

Key words: lateral line, underwater positioning, generalized regression neural network, bionics