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More on Underwater Gliders
ianjk writes "Abcnews.com is reporting on two underwater gliders developed by the University of Washington and Webb Research. Both use very little energy and have quite long ranges (thousands of kilometers). Of course, the US Navy is showing quite an interest in the project." We mentioned these earlier.
Makes snorkeling a whole lot less interesting..
From a technical Navy employee...
You would think that the Navy would be getting all sorts of funding for these types of projects nowadays... but really what's happening is that funding is being diverted to war operations type stuff... so those of us working on new technology for the Navy have gotten huge budget cuts...so don't expect much in the way of cool techie things any time soon.
"If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards."
This is exactly why water transport is a dead end that has rarely worked in the past.
Have been under study for years- the Mk48 Torpedo is basically a wire-guided drone; it reports information back to the mother sub and can be steered using a joystick.
The USN has been looking into extreme-depth tethered drones- really strange things start happening to sonar and weapons performance at extreme depth.
Of course, this will all come in handy if the USN needs to fight the Third Battle Of the North Atlantic, but for littoral (inshore) warfare, the navy might want to start researching some brown-water navy stuff.
Try harder next time.
There have been a variety of Navy programs that used trained sea mammals to protect Naval bases, for instance the trained dolphins trained to bump into a VC frogman in Kham Rhan bay, but they never told the dolphins that the bumping hat was an activated mine. Boom!, one less flipper, and one less Charlie.
There are also reports of using sea lions, seals other cetaceans to watch for submersibles and boats, and hit them, forcing a detonation. For instance, Day of the Dolphin is a thinly veiled documentary on teh CIA's attempt to train dolphins to blow up Castro's yacht.
So, with these, everyone will win. The Greenies cute little dolphins don't have to kill, and the US Navy can continue to enforce the Pax Americana, and the rest of the world (except for evildoers) can go about their business, criticizing war mongering Americans, yet profiting from the most peaceful age the world has known since the Roman Empire. We business savvy sorts call that a win-win situation.
Some guy over at kurofivehin, I think he calls himself "UndesirableUsername", said that water transport was The Way Of The Future!
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I wonder how deep these gliders will go? At what depth does the pressure start playing havoc with its sink/swim functions?
:-) but seriously.. I would love to see what kind of data a long term mapping program would compile..
I am really curious as to what we could find if we put a bunch of these in the ocean, and just monitored for objects that don't belong..
the sunken city of atlantis?
I am the lord of the pun. Dance Knave!
So what happens when the navy's underwater-spy-glider-drones are picked up in a fishing net?
However, because of the density of water, the boyancy is much greater than air. Since this "glider" works on this principal, it should be much easy to worked on a wave/boyancy principal.
I still don't see how it would avoid getting push around by stray currents, etc though. I could see one of these little guys wandering lost and off course at times.
but on Slashdot there's no such thing as "not subtle enough".
Forget about this skinny little "underwater glider".
What every geek really wants is their own luxury submarine!
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No Way!
C'mon people
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Evil sharks with laser beams attached to their heads!
Heh, really though, why not put the instruments on dolphins. I watched a History Channel program on the Russians strapping surveillance equipment to dolphins and even using radio "mind control" to tell them where to go. Radio controlled dolphins. You'll have an endless supply of them!
you know, reading articles such as this always leave me with the feeling that we aren't really exploring the use of the seas in future. Almost 70% of the earth is water, but we do not have that much effort or research money in it that we have for space exploration. It's really quite illogical to hope for the stars while ignoring your own backyard. Also considering that pure water is going to be one of the world's biggest problems, we should be paying more attention here.
It seems likely that these could evolve into smartmines
That's even better than exploding dophins!
We mentioned these earlier. Well QUIT mentioning this! Old and NOT news. Jeez!
Intelligent people do not make huge assumptions based on one aspect of a problem. I know you're trolling, but everyone knows that water is still the #1 way of moving goods economically across the globe. Unless you ignore things like bouyancy, the pitfalls of mucho potential energy, and aerodynamics, water will always be the safer, smarter way for transportation.
-Dean
She loves the hot pink underwater glider! It will match all of her outfits, her car, her RV, her house, her guitar, Ken's cardigan and her jetski. I wonder when Presidential Barbie will start bombing Iraq?
http://www.underwaterbike.co.uk/
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They said the batteres would be LiIon and that the submersible would be comming to surface to communicate, so why not add a couple of solar panels? Im sure it won't bring up the costs significantly. (Heck NASA probably already has a bulk discount on solar panels :) Does the depth and salinity in water affect solar panels; is that why they are refraining from using them?
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
Maybe not quite... Rechargeables decay after a while...
It looks like at least some of these designs surface periodically for a GPS fix.
Why not stick a small solar cell on the upper surface? Given the power requirements it shouldn't take too long to recharge. It can probably even recharge a meter or two (or more depending on the water clarity) down from the surface.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
It is a well documented fact the the countries with a dominant Navy have always been the pwoer house of the world.
.... which is why we keep a dominant Navy. They also make it possible to place embargos into effect!
... why do you think Great Britian was the power house it was back in the day? G.B. is just a small islnad nation, but yet they were the dominant force on this planet for over a century. Why? Their NAVY!!!
There is no way to fly, reload and refuel our (the U.S.) military planes and use them effectively in a war without air craft carriers
As far as history
Keep in mind that there is no way for any Asian or European countries to invade the Americas (if they wanted to) without the use of a Navy. A solid Navy is the key to winning ANY war (without using nukes).
Those who don't learn from history are doomed to re-live it!
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Charles Eriksen, an oceanography professor and one of the developers of the Seaglider, says that such a propulsion system isn't fast. At best, the glider can make about half a knot -- slightly more than half a mile an hour.
But since it will use only one-half watt of electrical energy to produce that speed, Eriksen says the Seaglider has a range of "thousands of kilometers" and remain in the ocean gather data for much longer.
"We can operate one of these for a year and across whole ocean basins," says Eriksen.
I can picture this thing going for a year...
Some Navy Officer: We've got a special mission for you, we sent out an underwater glider a year ago to collect data on enemy sub movement, we need you to recover the glider.
Navy Seal: Sir yes sir!
*goes into the water, takes 10 steps forward, reaches down, picks up glider*
Navy Seal: Sir I have recovered the glider sir!
The Navy however, has no figher pilot equivalent. The billion dollar war platforms that make up the submarine force are already very unglamorous to work in. The price tag of these ships brings in a whole new player to this battle. Congressmen and women LOVE to see high-priced defense contracts being given to shipyards in their districts.
If these mini-subs are truly effective and the demand for hugely expensive nuclear powered subs begins to drop, it will be interesting to see which senators favor the modernization of our military vs. those who want more pork barrel projects pumping fuel into their local economies.
-Shadow
Couldn't have thought better myself :)
With solar panels the batteries would have at least 500 chatges before the battery starts degrading! That means in theory, the AUV can stay in water 500 and 1500 years respectively...so then the weak point would be mechanics...
Just like missile defense. Peaceniks. They only love the military when they don't want the US to go to war.
And let's say the viscosity of air is 1 and that of water is 2. Then the energy to push the glider through water is twice as high as it would be in air.
That may all be fine and dandy, and you may be correct in the sense that it would take twice the energy to push this object through the water as oposed to through the air. However, there's a gaping hole to your theory:
The fact that the UAV needs to remain IN THE AIR, while the AUV can just FLOAT greatly reduces the amount of energy it will require. And if you create it with blow tanks and other such technology, that would allow it to remain at a certain depth WITHOUT the need to spend ANY energy, making it even more efficient than the UAV.
---
You can lead a horse to water, but if you can get him to float on his back, you've got something.
I know everyone is prolly thinking, "shit a submarine with the sonar signature of a dolphin." But this could be useful for things other than killing people. It could be used so smuggle black market goods, or even help people escape a hostile country. Maybe it could be funded with "Voice of America" funds...
A.Q. would have more trouble in hitting an oil super underwater glider like these. Pursue!
I am suspicious of anyone who entitles themselves "Genius". Anyone 3 year old could look up physics properties relating to underwater movement. :-)
..Want to see one swallowed by a whale. Imaging the face on the researcher. Then imagine the face on the whale when this thing expands it's ballast to rise.
Though this would make for an interesting part of ones thesis paper.
I also agree with the earlier poster -- a 1 Knot 'glider' in a 5 knot current sounds only slightly better than a buoy -- but you may be able to use that 1 knot active motion to do things like move cross-current and use different ocean currents to move you around the ocean.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
So someone finally found a use for the Iridium satellites after all!
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Rumour has it that the shark community will be code-naming these gliders:
"Lunch"
The tuna tastes better with dolphin added.
I can see how this might be a very useful way to carry relatively light cargo across the oceans. As long as the buoyancy of the entire ship is in the right range, it will work. This might be a good way to move floatable objects like Nike Shoes across the oceans. What do you think? Want to build a big sucker?
Isn't that patrick from spongebob squarepants?
But masters, remember that I am an ass: though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass.
the greenies may try to pressure the navy, but in the end the navy doesnt GIVE A SHIT.
there is nothing the greenies can do
must be pretty tasty
So, with these, everyone will win. The Greenies cute little dolphins don't have to kill, and the US Navy can continue to enforce the Pax Americana, and the rest of the world (except for evildoers) can go about their business, criticizing war mongering Americans, yet profiting from the most peaceful age the world has known since the Roman Empire.
Pax Americana?
The most peaceful age the world has known since the Roman Empire?
Sure, If you define it as the state of perpetual war that has existed since the 1930's: our governmentt has been going around the world finding excuses to pick a fight with almost anyone, and the result is large numbers of people in a crazed and desperate enough state of mind to fly a perfectly good airplane into a building full of people, and this is, of course, an age of unprecedented peace among mankind?
Perhaps its due to a preponderance of people who think that naval surveillance drones have something to do with training trusting sea mammals to be suicide bombers...
...if the DEA could use this kind of technology to track all of those 1 a.m. drug running boats from South America.
:)
Good place for funding at least
Sig goes here.
Bit of a loss when some larger fish sees this thing as lunch isnt it?
Why not just program the glider to surface every once in a while and recharge its LI batteries from covered solar cells? Eventually you'd have salt encrustation on the cover or something that would reduce the efficiency of solar collection (or cloudy days, more risk of danger from surface storms, etc., though for that you could pipe back meteorological info so that it could wait for calm periods). But it seems like you extend the operational lifetime of these things even longer.
You could also implement a surface & breathe operation to refill the compressed air tank on the second model. Run a small air pump off the charge from the solar cells. So it takes a couple of days to refill? No problem. Slow but steady.
make sure you write down the tag and send it back to the appropriate agency ....
I would have made it camoflauged, anyone know why its pink? Maybe PhysicsGenius can tell me that the pink color lowers the viscosity by a factor of 37% or something...
America's new drones will be no match for the eventual Chinese clone soldiers :)
But are they ill-tempered, or do they have laser beams attached to their heads?
(sorry)
Wow! The thermal version described in the article is very similar to the "glidoons" proposed in The Inventions of Daedalus a number of years ago. A glidoon is an inflatable glider containing a substance that is gaseous at sea level and condenses in the cold of high altitude. The craft glides up and down without fuel, driven only by the endlessly reversing buoyancy. Exact same principle, and they really did it!
fan post atd =420 90&cid=4434362
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?si
Why wouldn't they use saltwater batteries? Submarines use them. The only thing they need to come up for anymore is food. They can be made on a much smaller scale that would be suitable for this.
I prefer a void in conversation to a vacuous one.
I guess you're talking about the dolphins, not the CIA (cause we all know the CIA does)
I wouldn't get all technical on a ninja like that. After all, he liable to flip out and cut down a building. Or just eat a snack.
As a navy man owe up and call it a war, which is -exactly- what this "police action" will be. Hell, who wants to die in a simple "police action?" The moronic legal doublespeak necessary to choke this down the Constitution's throat is insufferable. Just changing the name of it doesn't the smallest difference, but it does insult people's intelligence.
Kinda reminds me of Blade Runner:
"Have you ever retired a human by mistake?"
I can assure you that there are other funds that allow us a great deal of R&D.
Like the "new" sonar that kills whales..?
-dameron
What is the potential for weapons deployment with a device like this?
I am imagining several dozen of these lurking around the North Atlantic waiting for a Soviet Submarine to rumble past. Could it identify an enemy sub and deploy a small torpedo in times of war?
Normally it wouldn't help too much, but given the extremely low power consumption of these devices, even a small number of solar panels could provide quite a bit of run time for a minimal amount of charge time.
Cover 25% of the upper surface of the pictured glider with solar panels and you can probably spend only 30 minutes to charge the thing every few days, or better.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Naval Officer was being sarcastic. Sometimes, I think that ppl need a clue stick (or at least some tags).
Simply read the next sentence. No military person likes to fight multiple enemies unless it is required.
Oh, they can have these deployed in mear months. But, to do that, they have to ask the defense industry to figure out a scheme whereby they can charge $5MM each for the basic $50K model.
Options like microphones and cameras, are, as usual, available at small additional fee.
Maybe these guys can depend on the Drug Importation racket to support them while the DOD groks their financing pickle.
Looks like a fish, swims like a fish, makes no noise, carries a few kilos to a designated target.
That usually means management got what they wanted (win 1) and the employees got screwed as planned (win 2).
I don't suppose you noticed that every time things are the way managment wants them, one of them leaps up and yells "Win-win" so as to terminate discussion. Morons.
how do they keep the animals from bumping allied units? or each other? (Reading that, I think I've been spending too much time killing nazis)
Look at the international underwater gliding online contest: http://www.onlinecontest.org/
Hehe, that reminds me of those dogs the Russians used to train to blow up tanks. They'd teach the dogs to look for food under tanks, so in battle they could strap a bomb on the dog and, in theory, blow up a German tank with it.
:)
Unfortunately, they trained the dogs using Russian tanks, so when the dogs went looking for food, guess where they went...
That certainly deserved a "d'oh"
The next step is to combine this with an ability to filter feed on plankton and technology from slugbot for a machine with infinite endurance.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Of course there's been an environmentally friendly technology for moving things on water for, oh, 5,000 years or more already.
Back in April I wrote about gliders' potential not only on Earth but on other worlds with oceans or dense atmospheres, especially those that feature notable temperature gradients:
o gy /sea_glider_020410-1.html
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technol
Erik
--and look at current reality and the trends. china has the worlds largest "navy". No, not like ours-not yet but they are working on that-but 'ships'. they got the most generic ships now, and build the most or close to it. There's no reason they can't dual use their merchant marine fleet. Umm, and every reason to believe they will at some time, perhaps with Q ship style modularized cargo containers as one of many parts of an attack. Imagine a few dozen (or more) ships from china all in US ports some time, but whoops! The containers on the top deck all have advanced missiles in them. Out of the box thinking assymetrical warfare. We got sats all looking down on china looking for launch signatures, and theylaunch from right close to shore. Hmmm. that would suck. Probably work, too.
I D= 6&Product_ID=886&CATID=9&GroupID=12
here is a link for anyone intersted in chinas way of thinking and doing..this is an url to a book available written by two chinese military officers. I am not affiliated with this site or selling this book, just the first link I found on the subject I remembered. It has an excerpt and synopsis
http://www.newsmaxstore.com/nms/showdetl.cfm?&D
nt
err, this isn't just a wargame for the PC. Loads of innocent people are going to die, be made homeless, see their hometowns bombed into rubble and the really evil people will get away. That's why some of us get uptight.
Pax Americana is probably the best we're going to get for a while, but damn, some of you guys treat war like it's a jolly little Victorian English game. Lots of us live in countries where war means enemy tanks rolling down your street in your father's lifetime if not your own.
still nt
Same argument goes for the Athenians, back in the day...
By the way, I'd argue that having a solid navy isn't the key to winning, it's just the key to not getting utterly thumped. The Spanish put together a truly enormous sea force for the Armada, but it wasn't all that successful.
Reality is the ultimate Rorschach.
You make some good points and everybody in Europe knows that the situation we have today is due to the positive intervention (in my opinion) of other countries. A lot of people are very, very grateful, including me.
What's interesting is that I can't tell which country you're writing from based on the statements about your country's foreign policy - I assume USA based on our previous exchange but the points you make could be written by a Canadian, Australian, New Zealander, Indian, Jamaican... these countries and many more sent troops and aid to fight in wars between 1900 -1945. We honour all these countries for their sacrifices.
My key point was that I think a people and their country's attitude to war is profoundly affected by their experience of it. I think that the US (and some other countries) experience of war as something that happens in a remote place is similar to the British experience of war in the 19th Century, rather than the European (and many other countries) experience in the 20th Century. I think it makes a difference that for the USA and some countries, war is still something that is about cheering the boys off to on a foreign front, while life goes on as normal back home. It's telling you note that previous wars you intervened in cost you 'millions of sons' - it only affected young men. For many countries (e.g. Europe), in living memory war has affected *everybody*, war is something that happens in your village. It's about enemy tanks driving down your high street, bombers dropping high explosives on your mother's retirement home, your school being used as a detention centre to accuse your neighbours of being terrorists and acting in the way the victors feel is appropriate. It's about your grandfather surviving in the bombed out rubble of his own home through the middle of the winter with no fuel and little food.
I think that this more direct experience of war makes some countries more reticent about engaging in such an act and gives them a different perspective.
Would you care to provide some analysis or evidence to back up that assertion? Mahan gave basically the same argument 100 years ago, and it is far from generally agreed upon today by military historians and analysts that he was (is) right. I would argue that it is oceanically isolated great powers who develop: i.e., if you are a great power without land access to your enemies/allies, it becomes of paramount importance to build a large navy. In other words, your logic is reversed: being a great power comes first, then normal logic leads to the creation of a large navy.
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:-)
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