Unmanned autonomous sailing: Current status and future role in sustained ocean observations

Abstract

The use of unmanned autonomous sailing craft for sustained oceanographic observations could result in sea surface measurements that have higher spatial and temporal resolution than contemporary methods such as Lagrangian floats, moored buoys, manned expeditions and satellite observations. Mission-specific utonomous sailing platforms could provide energetically sustainable missionspecific systems to forecast environmental events and to trace the distribution of meteorological and ocean conditions over a long-term period. This paper briefly discusses the motivation for using wind-powered unmanned autonomous vehicles for oceanographic/meteorological measurements, comments on significant historical considerations, outlines some current and past work, introduces aspects of such a vehicle developed at Florida Atlantic University and concludes by presenting policy issues and recommendations for future work.