Kongsberg Discovery says it has reached “another successful milestone” in the development of its HUGIN Endurance in completing a “record setting multi-week fully autonomous mission”.
After receiving a final navigation update from a pre-deployed transponder 10 hours into the dive, the 8-ton, 40 ft, Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) operated completely independent of all human interaction and with no external navigation aiding for the duration of the sortie.
This mission was conducted at depths ranging from 50 metres to 3,400 metres and met the advertised 1,200 nautical mile range. Most impressive of all, was that HUGIN Endurance returned with a position error of approximately 0.02 percent of total distance traveled.
The complex mission plan was designed to validate the design specifications of the AUV and put the vehicle through its paces in a real-world environment. The mission consisted of straight-line transits spanning 60-300 nautical mile (nm) legs and survey areas.
The survey areas covered 36nm2 with very high resolution synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) imagery and bathymetry, using Kongsberg’s HISAS 1032 Dual Rx, in less than 48 hours. Camera imagery and laser profiling data was also collected, at altitudes down to 9m.
Espen Henriksen, executive vice president uncrewed platforms division at Kongsberg, says: “The success of this mission proves HUGIN Endurance’s shore-to-shore operational capability.
“Removing the need for a surface ship provides a huge savings to our customers, in both time and resources. We are proud of our exceptional team has been working very hard to add this capability to our AUV portfolio.”
Rich Patterson, vice president of sales, uncrewed platforms division at Kongsberg, says: “All credit goes to our phenomenal team of engineers and operators that have made HUGIN Endurance the most capable AUV on the market.
“The mission we’ve just completed validates the design specifications of the system and provides proof that our HUGIN autonomy framework is fully capable of performing complex multi-day missions with no human interaction.
“We are extremely excited about the vast operational capabilities we can bring to our customers with HUGIN Endurance.”
While the results of this mission were not a surprise, they have most certainly solidified HUGIN Endurance as the most capable AUV platform on the market, ready for real mission deployment and operation.
