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65 as the Florida red tide dinoglagellate Karenia brevis often found in coastal environments. HABs can render drinking water unsafe, cause harm to wildlife and livestock, and suffocate schools of fish by depleting dissolved oxygen in water. Better understanding of algae – harmful or otherwise – is therefore critical to helping the world’s ecosystems. To that end, researchers from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project went to Clear Lake, California, in 2021 to investigate this heavily algaefied body of water and how environmental drivers influence the growth of particular algae and toxins. Gathering data for this experiment was achieved using an i3XO AUV from YSI Integrated Systems & Services, a subsidiary of water technology company Xylem. It was created by combining the Iver3 (originally created by OceanServer Technology, now owned by L3Harris) with YSI’s EXO water quality sonde, and has since been spun out into a distinct, turnkey solution offered by YSI. “It was in 2004 that we at Xylem first worked with OceanServer to combine their Iver2 AUV with our 6-Series water quality instrument sonde, and that was the first version of what eventually became the i3XO,” says Tom Goucher, product manager at Xylem and YSI. “More and more of our clients wanted to see our sensors ready-installed on an autonomous platform they could easily use. That demand kept growing over the years, so we kept iterating and improving it until we arrived at the i3XO we have now, which was first released in 2016. “Our VectorMaps user interface for this vehicle is very straightforward, so very little training is required to operate it, and it unpacks into basically two pieces – sensing and computation in the front, power and propulsion in the back – to make servicing and transport really easy. We wanted to make sure this AUV was as user-friendly as possible to minimise the learning curve for our customers.” Shawn Sneddon, YSI’s senior engineer for autonomous operations, adds, “The EXO sonde has all the calibration information inside its sensors, meaning you can move the water quality instruments from sonde to sonde or UUV to UUV without needing any recalibration, if a user needs multiple vehicles or sondes.” For the researchers in California, a single i3XO was deployed, with four sensors fitted for conductivity/temperature, chlorophyll and phycocyanin (a pigment protein present in blue-green algae), dissolved oxygen, and pH. The mission was planned through the VectorMaps software on a Getac computer, with each foray lasting about 6.5 hours and VectorMaps providing initial data analyses after each recovery. “And just as the sonde can have sensors quickly swapped in and out, the propulsion section can be swapped out completely with a fully charged unit for continuous operational time,” Goucher notes. “Our current batteries can give between 8 and 14 hours of runtime.” Future follow-up missions are planned, with the researchers having found the i3XO to be instrumental in repeatably gathering high-quality sensor data and generating testable hypotheses concerning factors behind HAB events. Chemical spills response While modern industry and technology has made life easier for billions, the colossal number of pollutant spill incidents into the ocean over the past century have caused untold damage to marine ecosystems, businesses and communities. Until global oil and chemical industries are removed completely from the world economy, such incidents must be expected to continue. Mitigation or clean-up of contaminants would benefit enormously from greater knowledge of how they drift and disperse in coastal waters. To help build such knowledge, one of French company Seaber’s Yuco-Physico micro-AUVs (equipped with sensors from AML Oceanographic) took part in UUVs | Insight More and more of our clients wanted to see our sensors ready-installed on an autonomous platform they could easily use, and the demand is growing Unmanned Systems Technology | February/March 2022 The i3XO AUV is being used to study harmful algae blooms in California (Courtesy of Xylem)