Ocean gliders payloads for persistent maritime surveillance and monitoring

Due to their long endurance at sea, underwater gliders are envisioned to play a significant role in persistent maritime surveillance and monitoring. However, so far they have been mainly used for measuring sea water properties such as temperature, salinity and optical properties. CMRE is considering using gliders for different new missions such as passive acoustic monitoring, sea bottom and sea surface characterization as well as service as an underwater or surface node in a distributed heterogeneous autonomous vehicles network. This paper describes the effort made at CMRE for developing and assessing the new payloads necessary for fulfilling those new missions. Hence, a comprehensive description of acoustic, environmental characterization and communication glider payloads is given in the paper. Results obtained at-sea with the use of the different payloads are briefly mentioned and demonstrate great enhancement capability for the gliders.