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INTRODUCTION
Man has always been dreaming of autonomous robots conducting boring tasks while he was playing golf. Unfortunately for him, that's not yet reality. Teams operating AWs still have to go to sea and they appreciate more or less the roll and pitch movements of the ship and the sea spray. Most of the time, users ask UUVs to collect information such as Oceanographic or Hydrographic: data. An UW concept will be efficient if the mission's cost is as low as possible and the data quality perfect. We will describe in this article a new concept, where the vehicle instead of being autonomous is controlled from the surface using a set of GIB buoys (GPS Intelligent Buoys [1]) allowing very accurate positioning of vehicles along track with a low cost suite of equipment. AUVS REOUIREMENTS If you analyze how AUVs are operated today for commercial applications, you discover that two positioning systems are used together:
One is on board the vehicle. Usually it is a more or less sophisticated dead reckoning system based on some type of INERTIAL-DOPPLER integrated navigation suite.
One is on board the support ship and is very often a short base line system coupled with a D-GPS receiver. Is it really necessary to have two systems working independently ? To our point of view in many circumstances (not all of them) the answer is NO ! The SUV concept will demonstrate how an adequate system architecture coupling the surface and the underwater suites of equipment can offer a very efficient solution. THE SUV CONCEPT SUV [2] means Supervised Underwater Vehicle. The word "Supervised" implies the fact that the vehicle is not autonomous. From time to time, the vehicle will receive new heading settings via an acoustic link. Also, the vehicle will have the capacity to transmit status data to the surface. This way, a proper system architecture coupling the specific advantages of the surface and underwater sensors can be optimized using proper links: local radio network at the surface and...