Onboard Autonomy System for the Slocum Glider

Abstract

In this paper we present a system for adaptive, long-term underwater exploration and monitoring tasks using buoyancy-driven underwater gliders. To address the limitations of shore-based autonomy for long-term glider deployments, we develop an embedded autonomy system and test it on a TWR Slocum G2 glider. Our system places the autonomy physically within the glider, which greatly diminishes the constraints on the amount of data that can be passed to the autonomy system. Furthermore, our approach eliminates latency in planning that is a result of relying on satellite communications during glider surfacings. In this paper we provide a detailed discussion of the hardware and software components of our embedded navigation (NAV) system. We also demonstrate the capability of the NAV system in the field through results from a pair of sea trials off of the Oregon Coast where the NAV system was used in an adaptive sampling task to identify temperature gradients.