Long-Endurance Test Results of the Solar-Powered AUV System

The solar-powered autonomous underwater vehicle (SAUV) was designed for long-endurance missions, such as monitoring, surveillance, or station-keeping, where real-time bidirectional communications to shore are critical. In April 2006, the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) Division Newport, Falmouth Scientific Inc. (FSI), and Autonomous Undersea Systems Institute (AUSI) conducted a 30-day, long-endurance test using SAUV II primarily to demonstrate that the vehicle is capable of conducting long-term oceanographic data collection and to validate the vehicle's mechanical integrity. This test also served to evaluate possible anomalies and risk-reduction measures for future production-level vehicles. A key part of this long-endurance test was the logging of the SAUV II charge and discharge rates under different sky and weather conditions with the vehicle under varied energy load situations a ta that can be used to assess vehicle endurance and help establish future mission capabilities of the SAUV II. This paper describes the SAUV II test vehicle, test methods, data collected, and the results of the long-endurance test