Development of an unmanned marine vehicle for autonomous monitoring and observation tasks

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The objective of this project is to design and build an innovative unmanned marine submersible surface craft to serve the needs of the off-shore operators in monitoring, inspection and profiling tasks.The vehicle will operate at the surface and also have the ability to dive, profiling in the water column to a depths of 200m. It will be able to operate, on its own power and guidance, for periods up to several weeks in the harsh ocean environment of the Northwest Atlantic. The ability for controlled operations at the surface and underwater will be unique for a unmanned marine vehicle. The sensors deployed on the vehicle enable atmospheric and oceanographic sampling, making it well suited for many different types of marine research. Other sensor suites, such as a combination of optical and acoustic systems, i.e. LIDAR and SONAR, will make the vehicle suitable for some key application areas in today's and tomorrow's off-shore industry. These tasks include but are not limited to iceberg profiling, offshore structure inspections, e.g. the riser inspection, or the automated inspection of support structures for offshore wind parks. The key result of the work will be the highly modular vehicle itself, with substantial value in the specific design elements of the vehicle, e.g. the vertical profiling system using a combination of buoyancy adjustment and active vectored thrust. The modular payload, i.e. interchangeable sensor suites, paired with the vehicle's unique spectrum of motion, i.e. an arbitrary user defined underwater motion profile, make this vehicle particularly suited for inspection and profiling task around man-made and natural structures. The second key output of this project will be the remote operator/user interface. This software will enable operators to plan execute and monitor progress of a mission and assess the state of the vehicle, i.e. health monitoring. Depending on the sensor suite all data will be available in close to real-time to the users or in the case of high data-rate sensors, such as cameras, an intelligently selected subset of the data will be transmitted.