Development of sea glider autonomous underwater vehicle platform for marine exploration and monitoring

Present study discusses prelimary design of sea glider autonomous underwater vehicle platform referred to as ITB-SGAUV. AUV is designed to be compact in size, with the purpose of exploring and monitoring marine living resources. Its hardware is designed to be reconfigurable enabling the researchers to change the placement of the sensors for testing different navigation scenarios. Hardware and software components are designed to be re-usable, which reduces the development and testing time. A low-cost sea glider has 1 degree-of-freedom utilizing buoyancy driver (glider) with fiberglass hull material that can operate up to a depth of 200 meters. Experimental result demonstrates that the sea glider works well in ascent and descent motion with maximum slope 30 degree. Maximum yaw angle is set to +3/-3 degree relative with respect to North. Thus it is expected that the sea glider can be used effectively in real environment. Future works include modeling the dynamic of the AUV and its advanced control design, along with its sea-trial.