Organised in association with the Society for Underwater Technology

To view the technical programme for Underwater Vehicles (ATUV 2006), please download the programme.

Unmanned underwater vehicles are playing an increasingly important role in the exploration and exploitation of the subsea domain world-wide, with important contributions to be made in the military, commercial and scientific sectors. This conference stream concentrated on the key technical developments in autonomous and remotely-operated vehicles, and their associated enabling technologies.

The Chairman’s views prior to the conference :

Dr Jonathan Evans sees improving the autonomy of underwater vehicles – providing them with the “intelligent” software to perform onboard re-planning of missions without operator interaction as one of the greatest challenges facing his segment of the industry; and another is the improved R&D funding needed by the whole AUV sector, including support for in-water testing to help close this “autonomy gap”.

“The ATUV conference themes cover the full range of technology development for AUVs, which helps develop the information-rich, environment autonomous planning needs for their decision making processes,” he explains. Some of these themes are:

• Vehicles and platforms
  power systems • propulsion • materials and structures • buoyancy • launch/recovery/docking • system integration • autonomy
  
  
•  Navigation and communication
  collision avoidance systems • data fusion • inertial navigation systems (INS) • interoperable navigation and communications • hybrid navigation systems
  
  
•  Sensor/interfaces
  biological, chemical, acoustic, optical sensors • bottom/geophysical sensors • gravitational and electromagnetic sensors • manipulators and tools • plug and play interfaces
  
  
•  Applications
  Intervention • survey • inspection • ocean data gathering • sampling • monitoring environmental impact assessments (EIA) • mine counter measures (MCM) • rapid environmental survey (RES)
  

Turning from challenges to the industry’s greatest success, he opts for the fact that: “Two out of three of the core domains for underwater vehicle technology, the military and scientific communities have fully accepted the advantages that the use of AUVs can bring, and that their use is no longer questioned. In the final domain, commercial offshore, the technological advantages are accepted, but the industry is still trying to work out the economics of how to fund its continued development.” He looks forward to this message being stressed at WMTC 2006 by a keynote address from a respected speaker.

He highlights the “obvious networking opportunities that having so many people in related fields together, but who might not generally meet directly because of the size of this large, fragmented industry” as one of the key benefits of WMTC 2006.