A Strategy to employ coordinated, autonomous Platforms for addressing long-term biochemical observing Tasks

Autonomous platforms get a growing importance for ocean observing tasks in particular to enable long-term observing tasks. Employing the mobility of those platforms allows a targeted investigations of phenomena that up to now are mainly seen from satellite but are lacking detailed scrutiny.

As part oft he national funded project ROBEX new operation concepts for mobile platforms are developed in particular a new type of underwater glider with larger payload capacity compared to legacy systems will be developed. First tests in the pool of a aparticular hull shape have led to a better understanding oft he hydrodynamic condition and an optomized hull design was derived from that.

The WAVEGLIDER system of Liquid Robotics lends itsself to be used as a communication hub and a platform to track underwater vehicles. Therefore the combination of those systems are currently assessed in regard to a possible operation and its hard- and software implementation. A major issue ist o achieve a coordinated displacement of these completely decoupled systems. Issues on how to mitigate faulty mission runs, coping with low communication bandwidths, and ensuring adequate positioning information about the underwater glider have to be addressed. Robotic concepts known from terrestrial applications like for UAV systems are tested under the more stringent environmental conditions in ocean waters.

With this combination of WAVEGLIDER and underwater glider it is planned to carry out long-term missions to investigate biochemical processes in the water column in particular to investigate the particle transport through the water column and the processes resulting from that.

Concepts and first results of those tasks will be presented.