The ocean has always been a force to be reckoned with when it comes to understanding and navigating its seemingly limitless blue waters. Previous innovations such as deep-sea submarines and ocean observation satellites have helped illuminate some of the wonders of the ocean, but many questions remain.

These questions are closer to being answered, thanks to the development of the Intelligent Ocean Observing System (ISOOS). Using this system, target areas of the ocean can be mapped in 3D, allowing more data to be collected safer, faster and more efficiently than current technologies can achieve.

The researchers published their results in the journal Ocean-Land-Atmescent.

“The main idea is to create an inter-domain network of tens of UAVs with the help of an intelligent carrier as the basis of a mobile system and a control center. [безпілотних літальних апаратів]USV [безпілотних надводних кораблів] and AUVs [автономних підводних апаратів]”For rapid, simultaneous, 3D observation of any target region,” said researcher and study author Chao Dong.

This “team” of unmanned ships and vehicles stands out with innovations in the field of intelligent autonomous machines, which are attractive for their adaptability and flexibility, to name just a few features. In particular, ISOOS can play an important role in understanding the role of subscale eddies, which are essentially circular water currents less than 100 kilometers wide that go against the general ocean current (eddies).

Currently, little is known about these eddies because they are subject to high variability in space and time. Therefore, rapid scanning of areas where they are commonly found could do much more to understand their formation and role in global ocean dynamics than is currently possible with existing methods.

Another advance that ISOOS could achieve is ocean floor mapping. This often requires a lot of time and cost, but the efficiency of ocean floor mapping can be greatly increased through the joint efforts of USVs and AUVs. For example, a notable recent attempt to use AUVs and USVs was the investigation of the alleged crash of flight MH370. Although no evidence of debris was found, the AUV and USV mapped 125,000 square kilometers (or 48,262 square miles) of seafloor in less than five months.

“In the future, we will try to use ISOOS to solve tasks that are impossible to solve or are done inefficiently with any existing technology,” said corresponding author and researcher Deik Chen.

ISOOS offers many more opportunities for research and scientific research, where people do not have to directly participate in the management of personnel on ships, but can instead manage or observe tasks remotely. The coordinated efforts of ships and vehicles used in ISOOS can save hours of effort, materials, costs and cargo.

ISOOS can also be used to search for shipwrecks or aircraft and to record time- and space-sensitive ocean events that would normally go undetected using traditional methods. Source