A research partnership between the US Navy's Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) and technology company Seatrec has demonstrated the use of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) in monitoring of oceanographic and underwater acoustic data in real-time, and near indefinitely.
The team’s successful development of an innovative, self-powered AUV known as the Persistent Smart Acoustic Profiler (PSAP) Voyager, has already delivered large swathes of oceanographic and passive acoustic data primed for NPS student research since it was deployed for the first time off the coast of Kona, Hawaii, in early November 2024.
Retired US Navy Commander John Joseph, a researcher in the NPS Department of Oceanography and principal investigator on the project, said the effort has been funded by the school’s Consortium for Unmanned Systems Education and Research (CRUSER), which is sponsored by the Office of Naval Research.
“PSAP started as a CRUSER project a few years ago when Yi Chao, Seatrec CEO and a well-known oceanographer, gave a talk at NPS about their energy-harvesting system,” said Joseph, who recognised an opportunity to combine the school’s expertise in undersea acoustics and research instrumentation with Seatrec’s energy harvesting technology.
PSAP offers an ability to collect and send oceanographic and passive acoustic monitoring data in near real-time for an unlimited period, thanks to the profiler’s ability to harvest energy from the temperature differences in the ocean, enough to fully power the instrumentation indefinitely.
“Theoretically, PSAP can be deployed once, communicate its acoustic information to remote operators in near real time for limitless periods without requiring retrieval to offload data, refreshment – such as swapping batteries or data storage, or replacement,” explained Joseph. “These characteristics greatly reduce lifecycle costs of a continuous acoustic monitoring effort.”