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keep on working. Underwater mariniz- ing of every component of a sail boat is actually a little tougher than you would think. Also, people don’t always think about the enormous amount of software and autonomy that’s required to have all these different systems work together and communicate back and forth with each other.” The work that’s been done in this space means Triton can run mis- sions based on pre-programmed way- points, with programmable parameters such as exclusion zones, with the ve- hicle using algorithms developed by the company to determine the fastest route to those waypoints.

Jordon Cousino, Chief Commercial

Of? cer, at Ocean Aero, adds that, while there’s a payload eco-system for un- crewed surface vessels (USVs), driven largely around Wave Gliders, and a pay- load eco-system created around AUVs, these eco-systems rarely break that wa- ter line in either direction. “So we’ve had to underwater marinize the USV payloads and the reverse on the AUV payloads. It’s a very complex eco-sys- tem that we live in. It’s literally a sailboat that’s a submarine and the complexities that come with that are challenging.” “The ability to push the envelope with battery technology, solar panel tech- nology, and power management is also something we’ve also had to get good at pretty quickly,” adds Decker.

They’ve also learned to simplify as much as they can. “We utilize a dual- element wing on the sail that had proba- bly 20 feet of cable that wrapped around numerous pulley systems and when you start putting these out for long endur- ance missions, we would start to see these smaller stainless steel cables either bust or break at certain points,” explains

Cousino. “So we focused on creating a ruggedized vehicle for long-endurance missions, where we went to a single element wing that has 77 fewer parts and tried to simplify the engineering as much as possible to allow for persistent operations without failure points.” “One of the things we’re proud of is user friendliness, the ability to launch www.marinetechnologynews.com 37

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