Autonomous surface craft provide flexibility to remote adaptive oceanographic sampling and modeling

During field experiments conducted in Monterey Bay, CA in the summer of 2006 and Dabob Bay, WA in the summer of 2007, a team of scientists and engineers from MIT outfitted an on-board winch and CTD system onto a SCOUT autonomous surface craft (ASC). Along with allowing both teleoperated and autonomous CTD profiling capability, this system was deployed as part of a small fleet of similar ASCs equipped with acoustic modem hardware and linked via 802.11b wireless Ethernet and evolution data, optimized (EVDO) to the ship and the Internet. Using this communications capability, the fleet of autonomous vehicles automatically uploaded oceanographic data to a remote server and remained in contact with scientists aboard the nearby research vessel. The uploaded data was nearly immediately available to the ocean modeling and prediction model maintained at MIT and Harvard University. Finally, the entire system was exercised with a completely autonomous test of sound speed using two distinct techniques: acoustic pings and a CTD cast.