High Speed Acoustic Network And Noncontact Power Supplier For Seafloor Geodetic Observing Robot System

A new effective seafloor geodetic observing robot network system has been proposed and is under construction in Japan, which consists of several submarine stations where interplate earthquakes tend to occur. Each station with an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) dock is connected to a land facility with cables for power feeding and communications. Near the AUV dock, three or four seafloor reference stations will be expanded for geodetic observation. In this system high bit rate and low error rate are required when uploading mass observed geodetic data from the AUV to its dock without a cable connection. A prototype acoustic network system with 100 kilobit per second (kbps) high rate and point-to-point protocol (PPP) implementation has been developed using a phase shift keying (PSK) modulation. Noncontact power feeding system is another key technology which enables AUVs to conduct observation for a long time. In this paper an efficient noncontact high power feeding system with 400 watts and 86% inverting efficiency for AUVs will also be described.