Development of a marine ecosystem and micro structure monitoring AUV for plankton environment

This paper describes a mission outline and a design concept of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) for monitoring marine ecosystem and physical microstructures. This vehicle is under development for a comprehensive research project "Novel technologies to evaluate multi-scale variations of pelagic marine communities and biodiversity under the influence of the Kuroshio and internal waves in coastal habitats." A cabled observatory will be deployed near the Oshima Island, which is located at the mouth of Tokyo bay, to monitor time series of multiple variables of biodiversity in marine ecosystem. The vehicle will observe plankton distribution along with the physical and microstructure measurements during deployment. The key point of this AUV development is to build a monitoring platform with low vibration at slow cruising speed, because the main target of the monitoring is the plankton environment with physical microstructures i.e. turbulences. For this need, the vehicle will be equipped with a newly developed water jet propulsion system. Acoustic communication nodes will be connected to the cabled observatory to provide a communication channel and a positioning aid.