home Sensors camera The New Electric Underwater Drone With 15-Day Range

The New Electric Underwater Drone With 15-Day Range

Apr 28, 2024

This post is also available in: עברית (Hebrew)

Kongsberg (a Norwegian tech company) is nearing completion of its most advanced autonomous underwater drone to date – the HUGIN Endurance AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle). Recent successful trials conclude months of assessments and means it is now ready for customer delivery. The drone’s sea trials, during which the HUGIN Endurance team verified and tested the AUV through various tests, concluded in March of this year.

Kongsberg’s President Martin Wien Fjell explained: “Endurance can accommodate whatever kind of payload a customer wants, whether for seabed mapping or inspection, oceanography, continuous surveys of offshore wind parks, or as a surveillance tool for critical subsea infrastructure or changes in ecosystems,” and claimed that “HUGIN Endurance enters the market as a game-changer.”

According to Interesting Engineering, the HUGIN Endurance is the largest AUV in the family and is manufactured by Kongsberg’s subsidiary “Kongsberg Discovery”. Kongsberg claims that the HUGIN series of drones, since being introduced in the 1990s, completed more commercial underwater surveys than any other UAVs.

This AUV includes a high-resolution synthetic aperture sonar that can perform wide-swath imaging, a multibeam echo sounder, a sub-bottom profiling system, a color camera, and a laser profiler. It also comes with a magnetometer and environmental sensors that collect data on conductivity, temperature, sound speed, methane, CO2, and O2 concentration.

The HUGIN Endurance is designed to operate autonomously from the shore and can travel up to 2,200 km for up to 15 days at sea with a full set of batteries. It can also autonomously map 1,100 square km of the ocean floor and has a depth rating of 6,000 meters.

While the HUGIN Endurance includes most of the industry-leading abilities that can also be found in previous HUGIN vehicles, new advancements were made to enable long-term unsupported missions, including greater redundancy, a new autonomous mission management system, increased situational awareness, and the ability to deal with varying water density.