Abstract
Based on a patent by one of us (E.W.S., Patent No. 3,<th>556,<th>035) RCA developed during the 1970’s the concept of a self-navigating, unmanned, sailboat. It was designed to be deployed from a ship or from shore, to sail for thousands of miles on a predetermined course, to collect upper ocean and meteorological data while station keeping, to telemeter those data back to shore by satellite, and then return to the point of departure, or some other point, up to a year later. It could carry any equipment ordinarily placed on buoys and could function in hostile weather and climatic conditions. This vessel seems ideally suited for the measurement of a number of ocean parameters using acoustical methods. We discuss the characteristics of the prototype that was built and tested with U.S. Navy support and compare its properties with Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) and Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (UAVs) that are presently being used or are under development. We describe our plans for resurrecting the RCA effort and, in particular, a sea trial designed to test the automatic enroute sailing and station-keeping of the vessel in an ocean environment using GPS and modern data transfer capabilities.
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