[M-IS20] Global climate change driven by the Southern Ocean and the Antarctic Ice Sheet

[MIS20-P10] An AUV Capturerig Drone “ANCO”

*Hiroshi Yoshida¹, Hirokazu Yamagata², Toshihiro Maki², Masakazu Fujii³, Yoshifumi Nogi³ (1.Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, 2.The University of Tokyo, 3.National Institute of Polar Research )

Keywords:underwater drone, capture

The underwater drone named ANtarctic Capture Object (ANCO) is specially designed for underwater capturing and recovering of the AUV, “MONACA”. ANCO is 0.7 m in hight, 24 kg in weight. The drone consists of a BlueROV2 based electronics (6 thrusters, a depth sensor, a TV camera, and a semiconductor based inertial measurement unit) and a HDTV camera. It has male and female docking devices on the top and the bottom of the body, respectivelly. It can manually capture the AUV which is hovering near a support vessel. MONACA captured by the drone is then pulled up with the tether cable of the dorone from the vessel. A main cable with a male docking device is deployed from the vessel and is mated to the female docking deveice of the drone. Two vehicle are winched up and are then on-board.
In the conference we report the test results of some docking operetion with ANC and MONACA. The detail operetion idea in the Antatrctic is also described. This development is supported by JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas No.4902, to observe the sea ice/ice shelf and seafloor for research of ice sheet-ocean interaction.