Hybrid glider Alba14 with laser-acoustic data transfer as a low-cost independent instrumentation data-mule

The management of sensor nodes on the sea floor represents an important challenge due to the high difficulties associated to the deployment and recovering of untethered instruments on the seafloor. These difficulties are not only related to the management of the instruments themselves but also related to the valuable information that can be lost. Ambient sound and interferences, maritime traffic, marine mammals behavior, oceanographic data are all among this critical information suitable to be registered. The fact of part of these information being missed, represent a void gap in the spatio-temporal identification phenomena analysis. For reducing the risk of losing information and with the aim of providing a feasible and low cost systems for recovering information from seafloor, a hybrid glider vehicle equipped with acoustic and laser optical communications is proposed. Preliminary studies as well as experimental results of optical/acoustic communications integrated in the hybrid glider Alba14 as data mule are presented.