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Underwater Robots for Everyone

Posted by michael on from the for-the-guy-who-has-everything dept.

Dirak writes "A small 112-pound ocean glider named Spray is the first autonomous underwater vehicle to cross the Gulf Stream underwater. Launched September 11, 2004, it has been slowly making 12 miles per day measuring various properties of the ocean. Spray spent 15 minutes three times a day on the surface to relay its position and information about ocean conditions and then glided back down to 3,300-feet depth ." And reader RoboFreak writes "Two Computer Science students at Brigham Young University-Hawaii have developed a Low Cost Autonomous Underwater Vehicle. The students also entered their robot, LUV, in the AUVSI and ONR's 7th International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition at San Diego, CA and competed against top Ivy-League teams. Their robot received recognition in the form of an award at this competition. This robot was designed with a budget of only about $600 and seems to be the cheapest AUV around. One of the AUV designers' interview conducted by Amit Kr Chanda of The Times of India is available here."

1 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. More Details by OctaneZ · · Score: 5, Informative

    This was actually our third attempt to make it from Nantucket to Bermuda, the first two launches unfortunately ran into technical problems very early into the mission.

    You can see the data it sent back over the IRIDIUM phone network every seven hours at these pages:
    WHOI Instument page about the SPRAY glider
    Our real-time plots page

    Make sure you check out the plot of velocities when it got caught in the gulf stream

    Also particularly interesting are the Continuous Temperature plot
    and the Continuous Salinity (salt content) profile.

    And you can also view the path it took to Bermuda

    We hope to launch it again early next year, possibly for a roundtrip around Bermuda.