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goes to show you how ? exible this boat is,” Thompson con- ? rmed. “One of the other things that we collected, just be- cause we could, was acoustic current data. It really is a pickup truck. You can put so many things onboard and with the size of the battery and the ability to generate so much solar power, it’s a game changer.”

Phase One

Phase one of the project served primarily as proof-of-con- cept, testing the vehicles and various sensors and their ability to collect the necessary data. “We learned a lot of what we needed to tweak to make that function,” Thompson said. “And we did it, and much better than we expected.”

The logical progression was testing longer duration sur- veys, assessing different sensors setups and running multiple

USVs at once in different con? gurations. “What we learned,”

Thompson added, “was that the vehicle could produce all this power, but we weren’t taking full advantage of that.” They switched the sensors to be powered or recharged by the USV, which made a signi? cant difference in terms of how much data they could collect. “We didn’t have to limit ourselves based on the power available in the sensors. We could collect more and more data. And it showed the advantage of being able to not just hit the certain coordinates that we’ll hit every year, but also ? nd where that boundary of hypoxia changes, zero in on that by taking additional data samples.”

SeaTrac was heavily involved at the start of this project, de- veloping new features like a winch to take sensors from the surface to the sea? oor. “A very important part of the hypoxia mapping is getting all the way to within a meter of the sea- ? oor,” said Boeschenstein. “Otherwise, you’ll miss important data. A big development effort on our part was, how do we www.marinetechnologynews.com 27

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