Presenter: Christian Meinig (NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Lab)

Description:
Uncrewed surface vehicles(USV) for ocean observing are valuable only if the environmental instruments are reliable and report data with a known precision and accuracy required to meet the project requirements. The surface ocean is a hostile environment for sensors on USVs and special considerations need to be considered in packaging, sampling, software integration and co-locating groups of sensors in the constrained space available for accurate and reliable measurements. NOAA-PMEL and partners have successfully designed, built, integrated and tested a 2nd generation Autonomous Surface Vehicle CO2 (ASVCO2) on the wave glider and saildrone platforms.  While most sensors used on USVs are adapted from commercial-off the shelf versions, this effort resulted in a sensor specifically designed for USVs and the workflow from lab to ocean with a diverse team of engineers, scientists and technicians involved at the full life cycle to get high quality data. Lessons from these efforts may be valuable to others for the complete life-cycle in using systems for ocean observing.  Developers made considerations for small-scale manufacturing, component testing, lab validation, effective technology transfer documentation, collaborative troubleshooting techniques and at-sea comparison methods to reference sensors to validate performance.