The Autonomous Conductivity-Temperture Vehicle: First in the Seashuttle Family of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle's for Scientific Payloads

The Mark 38 miniature, mobile, sonar target, originally developed for the Navy in 1973 as an expendable training aid for sonar operators, has been redesigned and reconfigured as a robotic underwater vehicle to carry scientific instruments for ocean research. The basic vehicle, named the SEASI-IUTTLE, is nominally 132 cm long, 8.9 cm in diameter and houses a microprocessor controlled guidance system that allows the vehicle to actively position its elevators and rudders in response to data from heading, pitch, roll, and pressure sensors. The vehicle can be programmed to follow complicated prescribed courses of action in five modes of operation: launch, mission, recovery, homing and homing search. It has a nominal speed of 4 kts, an endurance of 2 hrs, and depth tolerance to 250m. The vehicle is equipped with a homing system that returns it to an acoustic beacon, usually deployed at its launch point, at the end of its mission. The SEASHUTTLE provides power and control via a serial interface for instrumentation packages. The SEASHUTTLE has been fitted with a SeaBird CTD for measurements beneath the Arctic ice pack.