The IMOS AUV Facility has an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle called Sirius (IMOS platform code:SIRIUS), capable of undertaking high resolution geo-referenced survey work. This platform is a modified version of a mid-size robotic vehicle called Seabed built at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
This class of AUV has been designed specifically for relatively low speed, high resolution imaging and is passively stable in pitch and roll. The submersible is equipped with a full suite of oceanographic sensors including a high resolution stereo camera pair and strobes, multibeam sonar, a depth sensor (Paroscientific), Doppler Velocity Log (DVL) including a compass with integrated roll and pitch sensors, Ultra Short Baseline Acoustic Positioning System (USBL), forward looking obstacle avoidance sonar, a conductivity/temperature sensor (Sea-Bird SBE 37-SIP initially, now an Aanderaa 4319) and combination fluorometer/scattering sensor (WET Labs ECO Puck Triplet Sensor) to measure chlorophyll-a, CDOM and turbidity. The vehicle is controlled by an on-board, PC-104 based computing platform which is used for sampling sensor information and running the vehicle's low level control algorithms.
The vehicle has repeatedly demonstrated its capacity to collect high resolution, near bottom imagery and multibeam data that has been used to study novel mapping algorithms, techniques for automated image classification and to generate high-resolution three-dimensional sea floor models facilitating the detailed study of benthic habitats.
