Underwater AUV reaches milestone

5th September 2024

Caitlin Gittins

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Kongsberg Discovery is pleased to announce a significant milestone in the development of its AUV HUGIN Endurance, following a record-setting, fully autonomous multi-week mission.

After receiving a final navigation update from a pre-deployed transponder 10 hours into the dive, the 8-tonne, 40-foot Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) operated entirely independently, with no external navigation support for the remainder of the mission. This operation, conducted at depths between 50m and 3400m, successfully demonstrated the vehicle’s 1,200-nautical mile range. Remarkably, HUGIN Endurance returned with a positional error of just 0.02% of the total distance covered.

The complex mission was designed to rigorously test the AUV’s design specifications in real-world conditions. It involved straight-line transits of 60-300 nautical miles and survey areas spanning 36 square nautical miles. The high-resolution synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) imagery and bathymetry were captured using Kongsberg’s HISAS 1032 Dual Rx system in under 48 hours, with additional data gathered through camera imagery and laser profiling at altitudes as low as 9m.

“The success of this mission proves HUGIN Endurance’s shore-to-shore operational capability. Removing the need for a surface ship provides a huge savings to our customers, in both time and resources. We are proud of our exceptional team has been working very hard to add this capability to our AUV portfolio,” said Espen Henriksen, Executive Vice President Uncrewed Platforms Division.

“All credit goes to our phenomenal team of engineers and operators that have made HUGIN Endurance the most capable AUV on the market. The mission we’ve just completed validates the design specifications of the system and provides proof that our HUGIN autonomy framework is fully capable of performing complex multi-day missions with no human interaction. We are extremely excited about the vast operational capabilities we can bring to our customers with HUGIN Endurance," added Rich Patterson, Vice President of Sales, Uncrewed Platforms Division.

Although these results were anticipated, they have cemented HUGIN Endurance's position as an AUV platform, ready for deployment in real-world missions.