Underwater positioning and communications technology company Sonardyne International Ltd has initiated a collaborative project to drive a major step change in ocean system autonomy for long-endurance autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs)
With partners L3 ASV and the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), Sonardyne will focus on longer-term navigational accuracy for AUVs in deep water, while reducing power requirements and increasing autonomy in marine operations.
The ambition of the Innovate UK-supported Precise Positioning for Persistent AUVs (P3AUV) project is to enable AUVs to operate at high levels of navigation performance with less surface support and for longer periods.
The P3AUV project will involve trials using Sonardyne’s underwater positioning technology on the NOC’s Autosub Long Range (ALR) and L3 ASV’s C-Worker 7 autonomous surface vehicle (ASV).
The project will focus on three key areas:
One will be increasing long-duration navigational accuracy by integrating low and high-power Inertial Navigation System (INS) sensors.
Second, the project will improve positioning accuracy while underwater vehicles descend and ascend through the water column, through the integration of Doppler Velocity Log (DVL) current measurement capabilities and INS technologies with the onboard processing of data.
The third area will be enabling ASV deployment of seafloor positioning transponders.
Geraint West, Sonardyne’s global business manager for Oceanography, said, “By including high-performance, high-power navigation instruments, like our SPRINT INS, and integrating them with the low-power instruments to dramatically reduce power consumption, vehicle operators will get the best of both worlds, which will enable longer-duration independent deployments.”
“SPRINT-Nav will be able to use the water current velocity to reduce the dead reckoning mid-water navigation error, important to improving accuracy during both the dive and surfacing phases of an operation,” he added.
“Autonomous low-cost deployment of seabed transponders by an ASV is attractive to the offshore energy industry for AUV operation, as well as a wide range of scenarios throughout the whole life of a field, including exploration. Combining all of these capabilities will bring about a step change in AUV operations, providing a disruptive capability in the subsea monitoring and inspection space,” West concluded.
