Traditional AUV development has involved designing a vehicle, making it operational and then fitting available sensors to it. The Thales approach has been to integrate the vehicle and sensor systems during the design stage. This has produced a highly integrated system that is smaller and lighter than contemporary designs. This paper describes the results of this integration and the performance of the vehicle and sensors produced by the design.
AUV's have caught the offshore industry's imagination and are being billed as the weapon we will be doing battle with in the future. A quick survey of AUV's currently operating or in late stages of development for commercial operations shows an amazing range of sizes and shapes and very few design trends. On the one hand are very large vehicles that are designed to operate at speeds up to eight knots and at the other extreme are small vehicles designed to operate at more limited speeds with multiple vehicles. We at Thales GeoSolutions have chosen the latter approach.
From personal experience with AUV's dating back a number of years it appears that many designs have evolved from a generic AUV into a survey tool merely by adapting sensors to an existing vehicle design. With the Sea Oracle we have had the luxury of designing a vehicle around a sensor. One area of agreement there seems to be in the commercial AUV marketplace is that multibeam echo sounder data collection is the most important task for AUV's. Therefore the Sea Oracle AUV has been designed around a multibeam echo sounder system.
The Thales GeoSolutions Sea Oracle AUV is based on the third generation Odyssey class vehicle designed by Bluefin Robotics. Bluefin are a spin-off from MIT's Sea Grant AUV lab and produce military vehicles and science vehicles along with survey vehicles in commercial partnership with Thales GeoSolutions. The MIT lab's Odyssey II class vehicles developed many new AUV technologies such as a monocoque hull. The main feature of the Odyssey II class AUV of interest to Thales GeoSolutions was its simplicity. Since they didn't have hovering thrusters and were capable of simple mission profiles they were able to focus on the problems specific to AUV's and were able to gain valuable experience an a large number of dives.
Figure 1. Odyssey II Class AUV.(Available in full paper)
Bluefin, in conjunction with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) then produced a design for an Odyssey III class vehicle that would be configurable for different missions. The resulted in a vehicle that was tubular, 21 inches in diameter and had three or more separate sections. The key to the design was a common tail section that contained the propulsion, control, main vehicle computer, navigation system and communications. Essentially the tail section was the AUV.
