Autonomous Underwater Gliders – A Review of Development and Design and a Proposed Model for Virtual Mooring

Abstract

Underwater Gliders, primarily being used for oceanographic data collection, are a unique set of hull-forms traversing the ocean without using a conventional propulsion mechanism. They instead depend on buoyancy coupled with mass actuators which result in special maneuvering characteristics. Thus, they perform distinctive attitudes of motion such as saw-tooth and spiral maneuvers for lateral and longitudinal plane movements respectively. This paper deals with the review of the Autonomous Underwater gliders (AUGs) over the course of time with respect to the design and maneuvering attitudes produced, the hydrodynamics of the hull-forms evolved for particular design applications. A preliminary analysis of the gliders , both legacy (i.e., Slocum (Webb et al., 2001), Spray (Sherman et al., 2001) and Seaglider (Eriksen et al., 2001)) and modern XRay, ZRay (D Spain et al., 2005), Deep glider (Osse and Eriksen, 2007) and Sea-Explorer (Claustre et al., 2014) is undertaken to arrive at a model that can be used for virtual station keeping (Jenkins et. al., 2003) termed as Virtual Mooring (Nakamura et. al., 2013).

Mukesh Guggilla

PhD Student

My research interests include hydrodynamics, naval architecture, underwater gliders, numerical analysis