Sensor development: progress towards systems for AUVs/UUVs MTS Oceans 2000

The oceanographic community is seeing new and substantial advances in the development of underwater vehicles. The future is near when we will witness networked fleets that will acquire synoptic data over wide areas. The potential of multiple, concurrent AUV/UUV deployments promises the ocean research community with increased data accuracy, the elimination of spatial and temporal aliasing, and more efficient and cost-effective means of data dissemination. To complement these advances in AUV/UUV technology, we will need continued development of new and more sophisticated sensor systems, to expand our understanding of the ocean's processes. The University of South Florida's Center for Ocean Technology specializes in developing sensor systems to meet the ever-increasing need of oceanographers to collect high-resolution data relating to the chemical, biological and physical processes of the ocean. This paper presents up-to-date information about three of those instruments.