Adapting a Survey-Class AUV for High Resolution Seafloor Imaging

Over the past four years, development work at the MIT AUV Lab focused on a vehicle that is now almost a decade old. “Xanthos,” one of the last surviving examples of the venerable Odyssey II series of AUVs (developed at MIT in the early 1990s), is a small, deep-rated, lowdrag vehicle originally intended for oceanographic survey work. In this project, the AUV Lab pushed the limits of the Odyssey II platform to bring this aging vehicle up to the state of the art in underwater imaging. Originally designed to carry a CTD and ADCP, Xanthos was refit with DVL and AHRS for navigation, and sidescan sonar, high resolution digital still camera, and highpowered strobe for seafloor imaging. No part of the original vehicle was left untouched; several subsystems were redesigned and rebuilt from scratch to accommodate the new sensors. The ultimate goal: to turn a simple CTD profiler into a tool for deep-water