Growing interest in autonomous undersea vehicles
UAVs are already widely used by the military, homeland security, and, increasdigly, law enforcement; could AUVs (autonomous underwater vehicles) be far behind?
We are familiar with UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), and we now should begin to familiarize ourselves with AUVs, or autonomous underwater vehicles. These AUVs are important for deep-water oil exploration, military reconnaissance, coastal defenses, and scientific expeditions. They have the same advantages other autonomous systems have: They can explore hazardous marine environments without risking the health or life of humans.
Professor Sandor Veres from the School of Engineering Sciences at Southampton University is leading a European-funded project to increase the reliability of AUVs and reduce the risk of them malfunctioning or becoming lost.
The cost of missions using AUVs is an important aspect of the project in terms both of hardware and operating time. The National Oceanography Center, for example, has a six meter-long AUV that weighs over three tons and is worth more than £1 million. “When it’s operating at sea, if there’s a failure on board at a depth of 3km, it has to resurface at a speed of 2m/s, at an angle of 30º,” said Veres. “It could take an hour to come up, then take a day to rectify the problem…. The cost of a scientific mission is £1,000 an hour and, in the case of the oil industry, this cost can be higher, as well as the operation of the ship being more expensive. In those industries, it can be £2,500 an hour.”
This means that the Southampton project is also of interest to the insurance industry, which is undertaking the cover for these missions for various organizations, both in the oil industry and in science. The project aims to develop a methodology that could be applied to other autonomous vehicles operating in hazardous environments. Similar systems include unmanned aeronautical vehicles, satellites, and bomb disposal ground vehicles.
“The problem with these systems are they are one-off and not mass-produced,” says Veres. “There is no history of quality control and the people who are deploying them are not necessarily up to speed on how it works, so they make mistakes. We want to automate the checks so operators are reminded if something is not in place, or something is not done properly.”
