Onboard Processing and Transmission of Slocum Glider Acoustic Current Profiler Velocity Profiles

Project Period: 2020-07-01 to 2022-06-30
Sponsor: Office of Naval Research (ONR) National Oceanographic Partnership Program

The goal of this project is to develop enhanced onboard processing capability on Slocum gliders. Increasingly complex instruments such as acoustic current profilers, multi-frequency echo sounders, optical laser diffraction sensors, wave accelerometers, passive acoustics, turbulence, and many others have been integrated into autonomous underwater gliders. These and other yet to be integrated sensors offer exciting new opportunities to sense essential ocean variables throughout the world’s oceans and in extreme environments and conditions. However, the large data volumes collected by these instruments cannot be efficiently telemetered to shore. Thus, shoreside processing is not possible until after recovery and their use for real time applications is limited. If vehicles are lost during operations in challenging conditions, or in denied areas, no useful data will be recovered. Some sensors have recently developed self-contained processing schemes on their proprietary systems. While this is a significant advance it does not allow for user software to be developed including the combination of data from multiple sensing systems independent of integrated sensors. Teledyne Webb Research (TWR) is developing an enhanced science processor that will enable onboard data processing and real time transmission of derived data products. Our research objective is to 1) integrate this enhanced science processor onboard a Teledyne Webb Research Slocum glider, 2) implement real time onboard processing algorithms for integrated acoustic Doppler current profilers (ADCPs), and 3) transfer these derived products to shore in near real time.