Retrofit of a Legacy Seaglider for Smart Sensing Capabilities

Seagliders have proved to be important platforms for ocean research over the last decades, providing a useful way to observe the oceans. This class of Seagliders was designed and manufactured in the early 2000s, while they have been reliable over the years their operational longevity comes at the cost of low processing power. This study presents incremental work toward an open-source design that can act as a framework to upgrade this class of Seagliders with modern processors and software packages. Improved processing units can enable testing more sophisticated sampling techniques while using the existing vehicle architecture. Critical to the vehicle retrofit design is an understanding of the vehicle hydrostatics allowing for an optimized maneuvering performance. The study goes over the motivations for retrofitting this vehicle, hydrostatic analysis of the Seaglider, controlled tank test results for validating the analysis, and future work on the glider.