Development of an autonomous underwater profiler for coastal areas

Abstract

One of the most common ways of collecting ocean data is to deploy sensors from the surface, allowing to understand the variation of water properties with depth. Autonomous vertical profilers are robotic vehicles that replace human operators in this task. They form a particular class of autonomous underwater vehicles that move predominantly along the vertical axis, typically with reduced control on the horizontal axis. This paper describes a propeller driven autonomous underwater profiler, optimized for shallow waters. The vehicle has no fins or other control surfaces, and uses four independent thrusters to provide both vertical and horizontal motion, including hovering in the water column. The paper describes the main subsystems, including the hardware implementation, the software structure, and the motion controllers, with experimental data from the first trials.