Road to operation of the autonomous ocean vehicle (AOV)

Japan Coast Guard has started observation using Autonomous Ocean Vehicles (AOV) in 2016. The AOV is an autonomous unmanned ocean platform that individually delivers real-time oceanographic data to land stations for up to a year with no fuel. However, as the AOV has not yet widely been used in Japan, we needed to solve many essential matters to achieve proper operations. In this paper, we overview our AOV and focus on the countermeasures against three potential troubles such as marine biofouling, collision accident, and position loss. Furthermore, we describe the result of ocean current observation by the AOV equipped with an Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) and show validity of the AOV observation.