Design of an autonomous seafloor observation prototype system for deep seafloor observation

Abstract

The deep seafloor is closest to the Earth’s interior and the physical, chemical and biological processes of the seafloor interact complexly. Therefore, the observations of the deep seafloor are critical to the study of global climate change and the change laws of ecosystems in complex environments. For the requirements of long-term observation of the deep seafloor and remote real-time data transmission in the South China Sea, an autonomous seafloor observation prototype system is designed, which combines the sea surface buoy and the seafloor junction box with the Electro-Optical-Mechanical cable. At the same time, according to the requirements of marine environmental parameters, dynamic parameters and biodiversity information collection, this paper proposed a distributed data management model based on the CAN bus to improve the data transmission efficiency and ensure the data quality. In this paper, the design of each component of the autonomous seafloor observation system was described in detail, including its hardware, software and communication system. The observation data from the experiment were given. In the sea experiment, the seafloor observation data were transmitted to the shore-based control center in real time through the satellite communication network and stored in a database. 99.4% of the data were successfully received. The results of the sea experiment show that the system can meet the requirements of long-term observation and remote real-time data transmission, and the reliability of the system is verified.