Students in the Yonder Deep student organization at UC San Diego are working to develop a low-cost, modular, and fully autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) that will enable researchers to affordably collect oceanographic and climate data.
The organization, mentored by Grant Deane, a physical oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, has been working on the project for five years. The team’s goal is to design a torpedo-like AUV that can house a suite of sensors and be versatile enough to withstand the harsh conditions of both the Arctic and Southern California’s coastal waters.
You can see it in the render below.
The team’s current AUV is their fourth full-scale prototype, and they hope to complete intensive testing by the end of the summer. The Yonder Deep team is pushing the frontier of low-cost, high-value marine platforms for research in high-risk polar regions, and their work is critical to understanding sea level rise and developing systems for monitoring the Greenland ice sheet.
The team members see their work as an opportunity to apply their engineering skills to help tackle climate change and make a positive impact on the world.
“The Yonder Deep team is pushing the frontier of low-cost, high-value marine platforms for research in high-risk polar regions,” said Deane.
“This kind of work is critical to understanding sea level rise and developing systems for monitoring the Greenland ice sheet. It’s exciting to be working with this dynamic, motivated, and talented team of engineers to achieve these goals.”
In their first mission, the student team aims to quantify glacier melt and sea level rise. This can be achieved with typical AUVs, but the cost of typical hardware can run in excess of $300,000. The research from Yonder Deep offers a solution to the cost problem by 3D printing the systems.
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