Enhancements and performance of Seaglider Iridium communications system

iRobot licensed Seaglider from the University of Washington in 2008 and has subsequently been working to improve the reliability and performance of the design. One area that has received particular attention is the performance of the Iridium communication system. Improvements to the glider have been made in hardware and firmware. In combination with a new hosted cloud basestation and utilization of RUDICS, Seaglider now connects on the first call almost 90% of the time and data throughput rates have increased by greater than 10% resulting in greater reliability and less operational costs.