Underwater gliders: recent developments and future applications

Abstract

Autonomous underwater vehicles, and in particular autonomous underwater gliders, represent a rapidly maturing technology with a large cost-saving potential over current ocean sampling technologies for sustained (month at a time) real-time measurements. We give an overview of the main building blocks of an underwater glider system for propulsion, control, communication and sensing. A typical glider operation, consisting of deployment, planning, monitoring and recovery are described using the 2003 AOSN-II field experiment in Monterey Bay, California. We briefly describe the recent developments at NRC-IOT, in particular, the development of a laboratory-scale glider for dynamics and control research and the concept of a regional ocean observation system using underwater gliders.