Unmanned Systems Technology 028 | ecoSUB Robotics AUVs I ECUs focus I Space vehicles insight I AMZ Driverless gotthard I InterDrone 2019 report I ATI WAM 167-BB I Video systems focus I Aerdron HL4 Herculift

24 ‘D isruptive’ and ‘democratising’ are terms that Terry Sloane, managing director of Planet Ocean and its offshoot ecoSUB Robotics, uses to describe the family of small AUVs developed over the past four years. He justifies these bold adjectives by alluding to the vehicles’ low cost, tiny but very capable sensors, an endurance that exceeds a full working day and their out-of-the-box autonomous and cooperative behaviours. The smallest of them, the 4 kg ecoSUBμ5 – 925 mm long and 111 mm in diameter – will be the main focus of this article, but the larger m5 and m25 that share the core technology will also feature. Originally conceived for risky under-ice operations, they are in service with beta testers and early adopter operators for scientific, educational, military and commercial survey missions, with around 40 built so far. The ecoSUB story starts in 2012 when Sloane received a call from the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) in Southampton, on the south coast of England, saying that one of its engineers had an idea for a small, low-cost air- launched submarine that would be deployed from an aircraft, gather data under ice and be recovered by boat. The NOC had not been successful in finding funding for it and was busy developing the much larger Autosub family at the time, so it asked Sloane to assess its commercial viability. He concluded that it was not viable because there were Peter Donaldson explains how market trends drove the development of the core technology underpinning this trio of AUVs Three of a kind October/November 2019 | Unmanned Systems Technology