Working-AUV "Otohime" and its sea trials at Sagami Bay

Abstract

Since October 2010, JAMSTEC has developed two autonomous uderwater vehicles (AUVs); a cruising-AUV “Jinbei” and a working-AUV “Otohime” (Fig.1). Their major purposes are to observe underwater CO2 distribution around carbon dioxide capture and storage field, and to explore seabed mineral resources in Japan's EEZ. The cruising-AUV performs wide area survey with sonars and chemical sensors. According to the survey results, the working-AUV “Otohime” accesses feature points and observes seafloor in detail, with its chemical sensors, cameras, and a manipulator. In this paper, we introduce the newly developed AUV “Otohime” and its sea trials at Sagami Bay. Through two dives at the depth of 80-120m for total 3 hours operation, we verified the performance of the overall hardware/software systems.