UST030

22 A s access to oceanic resources grows, so governments and multinational corporations are investing in ways to vastly increase the survey and mapping data accumulated per mission, while reducing the downtime between dives as well as the time and costs associated with each mission. From these demands has emerged a new class of UUV that is far greater in size, operating range and endurance than a typical survey UUV, and termed by some as a ‘large UUV’, ‘LUUV’ or even ‘extra-large unmanned underwater vehicle’, or XLUUV. Vancouver-based Cellula Robotics’ Solus-LR, which is 8.5 m long and weighs 3.7 t in the air, is the newest entry in this class. Project history The origins of the Solus-LR lie with an open call issued by the Canadian government near the end of 2016 through the Defence Research and Development Canada agency, which set a challenge for an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) that could travel for a minimum of 1000 km over months at a time. “Government procurement proposals are often very prescriptive, but this was an unusually broad proposal for them, leaving most of it up to industry to be creative with their solutions,” notes Adrian Woodroffe, business development manager at Cellula. “We came up with a three-step project. First came the lab development of a fuel Rory Jackson explains how this monster of the deep was developed for long-range missions Extra-large serving February/March 2020 | Unmanned Systems Technology