C-SCOUT: a general-purpose AUV for systems research

In September of 1998, a collaborative effort between the Institute for Marine Dynamics (IMD) of the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the Ocean Engineering Research Centre (OERC) of Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN) began the design of a streamlined autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) to serve as a testbed for IMD and graduate level research. The paper describes the development and fabrication process, which was largely carried out by graduate and work-term students. The developed AUV is expected to serve as a testbed to assist in the development of future control and propulsion systems, the testing of vehicle components, and as a general research and development tool for years to come. Future versions of the AUV can be configured for a wide variety of missions including search and survey, under ice operations, iceberg profiling, oceanographic sampling, mine detection and countermeasures, and environmental monitoring. One particular application the vehicle is monitoring around offshore oil rigs, specifically looking at offshore discharges of produced water, rock cuttings, and drilling mud.