Desi stealth vessel ready for sea trial in March
Thiruvananthapuram: After hitting the sky with unmanned aerial vehi cles, India is well on the way to test the ocean depths with its own unmanned underwater vehicle. The home-grown Autonomous Underwater Vehicle-150″ will be put to sea trials in March 2010 from the Chennai coast.
Developed by the Durgapur-based Central Mechanical Engineering Re-search Institute, a unit of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSR), the unmanned vehicle has im-mense civilian and military potential “AUV-150 will be tested in sea for sen floor mapping and monitoring or en vironmental parameters such as cur rent, temperature, depth and salinity” CMERI director Gautam Biswas told TOI. “Once the technology is proven through extensive trial, the same
vehicle with required customization may be used for other future applications such as coastal monitor ing, military reconnaissance, mine counter measures, cable and pipeline surveys littoral zone sensing and reore he added. The project was spon-sored by the ministry of earth sciences and had technical assistance from the IIT Kharagpur. “A full-scale prototype was put to freshwater test in the Iduk ki dam in Kerala recently. The results showed that all navigational parame ters functioned satisfactorily,” says S N Shome, group head for robotics and automation at CMERI under whose supervision the AUV took shape.
The prototype weights 490 kgs and measures 4.8 metres in length and has a diameter of 0.5 metre. It carries a number of navigational systems like depth sensor, altimeter, sonar and GPS and payload sensors. A hybrid communication system that uses ra-dio waves while on the surface and acoustic underwater ensures seam-less communication. The remote.con-trolled Vehicle uses a Lithium poly-mer battery and can operate up to depths of 100 to 150 metres and achieve speed of 2-4 knots.
The final version will leapfrog In-dia to a select group of nations like USA, Australia, Germany, Russia, Ko-rea and Japan which are vigorously pursuing autonomous underwater technology and underwater robotics
“The institute had been working on the project since 2003, but with the stress being on indigenization, it was bound to be time consuming,” says S Nandy, another scientist associated with the project.
