Ocean News technology - ECA Group to Develop Ultra-Deep Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV)

Published on oceannews.com, January 2017.

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"Linking ocean science to marine industry

Ifremer will be driving this project with regional and european fundings. It will oversee the development of the new AUV vehicle, its associated equipment and control software system.

High performance in deep-sea survey and inspection tasks

The AUV is meant to accomplish wide coverage acoustic mapping and optical inspection by hovering close to the sea floor. The system have full range of scientific sensors in modular packages, autonomy, payload volume and navigation capabilities. The AUV will allow to produce produce accurate georeferenced, wide area, high resolution and multi parameter representations of deep water marine environment.

“The association of long endurance survey and low altitude hovering capabilities will have high potential in various fields of application. For future commercialization by ECA Group A6K AUV system specifications will have applications for missions such as deep sea mining survey, oil / gas pipeline inspections, rescue missions and mineral resource exploration.

Strong variety of deployment options

“The A6K unmanned vehicle will be deployed from oceanographic research vessels in missions involving other deep water intervention vehicles. An innovative optical communication device currently under development will enable real time data exchange with other underwater vehicles.

Furthermore, the following aspects will be developed during the new AUV project:

• The compact and innovative design will be compatible with launch and recovery modes already developed by ECA Group during ESPADON project in 2016. A containerized transport solution will simplify system mobilization, reducing operational expenditures.
• The design will as well benefit from ECA Group experience gathered during AUV ALISTAR 3000 developments for hovering capabilities, where high performance pipeline inspections were being deployed.
• The embedded controller developed by Ifremer will be tightly coupled with the vehicle’s sensor payloads and provide online re-planning and event driven autonomous mission behaviors. Onboard processing algorithms developed in cooperation with the scientific end–users will allow optimizing long duration missions on high level, meeting well defined scientific goals. The ability to perform targeted multi-parameter (physical and chemical properties, acoustic, optic, laser scanning imagery) data acquisition will constitute a significant performance improvement over existing autonomous platforms and will allow the scientific end user to better characterize vast areas of the seafloor.

Read more about : Ifremer has chosen ECA Group to develop an innovative ultra-deep Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) for survey and inspection

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