A spatial rotation technique in application to unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) sonar arrays is proposed. The essence of the technique is to rotate the signals of interest from the array coordinates to geodetic coordinates while providing robustness against interferences and preserving the white noise property at the output. Convex formulation of the rotation matrix design problem is derived using the semi‐definite relaxation technique and the optimal solution is obtained by rank‐one decomposition theorems. Using the authors’ technique, the subspace‐based direction of arrival estimation methods can get large snapshot support for weak sources in the UUV motion‐case.