OceanScout - Developing a compact, affordable, fleet-capable autonomous glider

Hefring Engineering has created OceanScout, a new underwater glider designed for compactness, simplicity and affordability. The vehicle is optimized for shelf & upper ocean measurements, low personnel requirements, long duration deployments, and scalable multi-vehicle operations. Affordability will facilitate adoption by new glider users, and scalability will enable established groups to deploy greater numbers of vehicles. This paper provides a review of the design and capabilities of the prototype OceanScout glider.