Unmanned Systems Technology 024 | Wingcopter 178 l 5G focus l UUVs insight l CES report l Stromkind KAT l Intelligent Energy fuel cell l Earthsense TerraSentia l Connectors focus l Advanced Engineering report

46 Insight | UUVs The 1.05-tonne vehicle can cover 200 km in AUV mode, and intermittently transform into ROV mode using four linear actuators that were designed in- house. These open the hull and enable two robotic arms to be extended and operate valves or subsea tools. Demonstrations of the Aquanaut are expected soon, with commercial deployments as early as next year. Prospecting Before deploying critical industrial equipment, however, it is often crucial to be able to quickly locate where strategically imperative marine resources are. To that end, the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science Technology (JAMSTEC) ordered a New Generation Remus 6000 AUV from its manufacturer Hydroid in November 2018. “In 2018, Japanese sailors spotted some vessels from foreign nations sitting in Japan’s waters, and when they went out there to investigate why, they discovered it was because there were huge deposits of rare earth metal sulphides on the sea floor,” says Graham Lester, senior vice-president of sales and marketing at Hydroid. “These metals are critical to modern electronics, and can typically only be sourced from countries such as China and Russia, so they’re an important commercial and national asset.” Reports have indicated that the deposits are immense, containing for example the potential to supply the entire world’s demand for terbium and dysprosium for 420 and 730 years, respectively. These elements are vital for producing high-temperature neodymium alloys for permanent magnets in electric motors, for example. The Japanese government has thus funded a large national programme to investigate this area before extractive operations can begin. The New Generation Remus 6000 will support the initial survey operations, and map the appropriate regions of the seafloor. As part of the programme, the AUV must be deployed and conducting surveys by March 2020. Hydroid will have finished production of the vehicle by November this year, before delivering it to Japan for operational tests. Payloads for sub-bottom profiling, side-scan imaging and multi-beam bathymetry measurement were key requirements from JAMSTEC on the Remus 6000’s capabilities, in addition to working with the agency’s existing control infrastructure and protocols. The flexibility of the AUV’s navigation software enables it to take inputs from JAMSTEC’s acoustics and other technologies, avoiding the need to change ship-side software to operate the vehicle, which would have driven up mission costs. “The New Generation 6000 has become a much more modular design – the original was designed with a compact architecture for deep-water missions, and as such the flexibility of its payloads was a notable limitation over time,” Lester says. “Customers wanted to put increasingly large and complex payloads onto it, so a more modular payload infrastructure – and programming the software to cope with that – was a major target for the New Generation’s design team from the start.” Carrying more energy to support the extra payloads, as well as enable longer dives, followed on from this as a key design point. Three pressure housings will be available on the new Remus 6000, for battery packs of 12 or more kWh, compared with two pressure housings for 12 kWh packs on the older model. As Lester explains, “Our other Remus systems follow a typical AUV pressure tube design, but the 6000 works using a kind of titanium ‘backbone’ – essentially a lattice framework, with sensors and electronics integrated into it. “We then wrap that in syntactic foam to give it buoyancy. That fundamental design will remain, and be physically February/March 2019 | Unmanned Systems Technology Hydroid is developing the New Generation Remus 6000 AUV to help survey Japanese seafloors for rare earth elements (Courtesy of Hydroid) A more modular payload structure – along with programming the software to cope with that – was a major aim from the start