Pipefish AUV: The flight style AUV delivering small, purpose built, hover capable AUVs

Abstract

A current challenge for AUV missions is to combine long endurance with high manoeuvrability. The proposed Pipefish AUV is a long endurance AUV capable of high quality survey missions that can deliver multiple hover capable AUVs to sites of interest. The Pipefish AUV and the small vehicles can perform cooperative tasks and reach remote locations without the need for a monitoring surface vessel. It is shown that an endurance of six days can be achieved, whilst transporting smaller AUVs of a volume of almost two cubic metres