Development of Underwater Vehicle for Virtual Mooring

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In recent years, predictions of changes in the environment on earth and studies on ecodevelopment have become important. For this research on going ocean data in time and space is required, and has been obtainable using by mooring systems. However, a conventional mooring system can observe only discrete data in perpendicular space and moreover, construction of such a system requires a manpower and great expense.To solve this problem, an underwater vehicle for virtual mooring is studied. The vehicle that houses various pieces of observation equipment glides back and forth between the sea surface and the seabed collecting ocean data. When the vehicle returns to the sea surface, the measured data is transmitted to a research base by a communications satellite. The vehicle then automatically checks its current position by GPS. If the position is outside the sea area of virtual mooring because of currents etc., the vehicle is controlled so that it returns the previous area during its next dive. Diving and surfacing are repeated periodically. On the seabed, the vehicle rests for a predetermined period and power other than control equipment is shut off in order to cut down on battery consumption.In this research, the mathematical model of the underwater vehicle (disc-type glider) for virtual mooring was built, and hydrodynamic coefficients of the vehicle were measured, and motion simulations and tank tests on gliding performance were carried out. Then, the testbed vehicle "LUNA" was made based on these results. The simulated and experimented results on "LUNA" showed that virtual mooring by the disk type glider is possible.