RS Aqua are delighted to announce their exclusive partnership agreement with ALSEAMAR to bring their SeaExplorer Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) to the UK and Ireland.
Based in Aix-en-Provence, France, ALSEAMAR are the developers and manufacturers of the SeaExplorer underwater glider. These gliders are Autonomous Underwater Vehicles with very long endurance, allowing them to be deployed at sea for several months while monitoring large areas of ocean (thousands of km).
By continually modifying its buoyancy, the SeaExplorer silently glides up and down in the water column, and has an altimeter in the nose to detect and avoid the seabed. Changes to its battery pack orientation control its angle of motion. This method of propulsion produces an effortless sawtooth-like trajectory through the water, and provides an eco-friendly way of collecting physical, chemical, biological and/or acoustic data depending on the sensors installed on the glider.
The SeaExplorer glider is a very cost-effective solution for data collection as it reduces reliance on large vessels with high daily running costs; no surface supervision boat is required during the mission. The SeaExplorer is easy to operate and can be deployed and recovered by a few individuals in coastal waters using small boats. No external moving parts and a two independent CPUs for navigation and payload control mean the glider is an operationally safe, reliable and low-maintenance platform for deployment, while the Opensource C++ firmware also allows for easy, configurable software. The SeaExplorer is controlled through a web-platform that can be accessed from anywhere in the world via a simple Internet connection, which also allows to visualize in real-time the data gathered by the vehicle.
The SeaExplorer is depth rated to 1000m, weighs 59 kg in air and features a rechargeable Li-ion battery. The glider can be equipped with a large variety of sensors, of which up to six can be fitted to one SeaExplorer, including:
- CTD (pumped or non-pumped)
- Dissolved Oxygen (Optode or Electrochemical)
- Chlorophyll / Turbidity / CDOM
- PAR
- ADCP
- Nitrates
- pCO2
- Echosounder
- Fluorometers options
- PAM
- Methane
- Hydrocarbons
- Turbulence
This versatility has allowed the SeaExplorer to be used in a variety of applications, including Marine Science, Environmental Monitoring, Oil & Gas Surveys, and Defence & Security. With regular data upload facilitated upon surfacing via the IRIDIUM® satellite network, the glider can provide near real-time data from remote locations anywhere in the world. It also carries an external Ethernet connection, meaning the glider doesn’t need to be opened for data offload, which rapidly cuts down the time between deployments. All these features make the SEAEXPLORER one of the easiest to use and technologically advanced platforms in the AUV sector.
By RS Aqua
