Under Ice in Antarctica: The Icefin Unmanned Underwater Vehicle Development and Deployment

Spears, Anthony; West, M. E.; Meister, M. R.; Buffo, J. J.; Walker, C. C.; Collins, Thomas R.; Howard, Ayanna M.; Schmidt, B. E.

doi:10.1109/mra.2016.2578858

Cited by 36 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…There exists a wide variety of robotic vehicles that have been successfully deployed in ice-covered environments (see e.g. Spears and others, 2016, for an overview of some of these systems). Gliders are AUVs that vary their buoyancy to produce forward propulsion and can travel under sea ice (Asper and others, 2011).…”

Section: Robotic Vehiclesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Platelet ice, the Southern Ocean's hidden ice: a review

et al. 2020

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Basal melt of ice shelves is not only an important part of Antarctica's ice sheet mass budget, but it is also the origin of platelet ice, one of the most distinctive types of sea ice. In many coastal Antarctic regions, ice crystals form and grow in supercooled plumes of Ice Shelf Water. They usually rise towards the surface, becoming trapped under an ice shelf as marine ice or forming a semi-consolidated layer, known as the sub-ice platelet layer, below an overlying sea ice cover. In the latter, sea ice growth consolidates loose crystals to form incorporated platelet ice. These phenomena have numerous and profound impacts on the physical properties, biological processes and biogeochemical cycles associated with Antarctic fast ice: platelet ice contributes to sea ice mass balance and may indicate the extent of ice-shelf basal melting. It can also host a highly productive and uniquely adapted ecosystem. This paper clarifies the terminology and reviews platelet ice formation, observational methods as well as the geographical and seasonal occurrence of this ice type. The physical properties and ecological implications are presented in a way understandable for physicists and biologists alike, thereby providing the background for much needed interdisciplinary research on this topic.

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Section: Robotic Vehiclesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Platelet ice, the Southern Ocean's hidden ice: a review

et al. 2020

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“…For example, the NASA ICEE resource accommodation plan for a Europa surface lander limits the entire payload to just 32.7 kg, 1,600 W h, and 600 megabits for 20 days of stationary operations (Krajewski, 2018 ). Survey below the estimated 10 km thick Europan ice sheet (Billings and Kattenhorn, 2005 ) using a mobile platform will almost certainly require decreased payload accommodation, suggesting that propulsion/hotel load balancing will result in a platform with a mass and power budget less than, or at most equivalent to, prototype designs presently under consideration (Hildebrandt et al, 2013 ; Spears et al, 2016 ; Wirtz and Hildebrandt, 2016 ). Assuming a mission cost in excess of $100M at present currency values, this translates to a Europan survey platform costing more than $1M per kg.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving Resource Management for Unattended Observation of the Marginal Ice Zone Using Autonomous Underwater Gliders

Duguid

Camilli

2021

Front. Robot. AI

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We present control policies for use with a modified autonomous underwater glider that are intended to enable remote launch/recovery and long-range unattended survey of the Arctic's marginal ice zone (MIZ). This region of the Arctic is poorly characterized but critical to the dynamics of ice advance and retreat. Due to the high cost of operating support vessels in the Arctic, the proposed glider architecture minimizes external infrastructure requirements for navigation and mission updates to brief and infrequent satellite updates on the order of once per day. This is possible through intelligent power management in combination with hybrid propulsion, adaptive velocity control, and dynamic depth band selection based on real-time environmental state estimation. We examine the energy savings, range improvements, decreased communication requirements, and temporal consistency that can be attained with the proposed glider architecture and control policies based on preliminary field data, and we discuss a future MIZ survey mission concept in the Arctic. Although the sensing and control policies presented here focus on under ice missions with an unattended underwater glider, they are hardware independent and are transferable to other robotic vehicle classes, including in aerial and space domains.

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“…A similar concept of remote control is represented by the Europa Underwater Probe ''Icefin.'' This AUV platform can be considered as an autonomous and remotely controlled small multiparametric probe designed to operate below the ice shell through a tether, and could also be used in exo-ocean exploration (Spears et al, 2016).…”

Section: Deep-sea Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (Auvs)mentioning

confidence: 99%