Development of Onboard Processing Capabilities for a Slocum Glider Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler

Abstract

A growing number of increasingly complex instruments have been integrated into autonomous underwater vehicles over the past two decades. While these newly glider integrated sensors provide unprecedented insight into ocean processes, the large data volumes collected by these instruments cannot be efficiently telemetered to shore. Shoreside processing is not possible until after recovery and the use of these data for realtime applications is limited. If vehicles are lost during challenging conditions, or in denied areas, no useful data will be recovered. Thus, there is a need for a sensor agnostic real-time processing software and hardware architecture for autonomous underwater vehicles. The findings detailed here describe initial results from the development and testing of an acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP) linear inversion algorithm that will serve as the first test case for the implementation of real-time data processing system onboard a Slocum glider. A new Teledyne RD Instruments Pathfinder ADCP mounted on Slocum glider RU33 and deployed off the coast of New Jersey near a moored buoy with downward looking ADCP. Though quality controls steps and several derived parameters warrant further analysis, initial results from the linear inversion algorithm are highly correlated with the buoy current measurements.