Fig. 8. Conceptual drawing for a laboratory-scale glider.
such as volumetric rate and absolute displaced volume are to
be designed such that the glider reaches a steady state glide
within 2/3 of the depth of IOT’s towing tank (tank depth: 7m).
In a next step we are going to perform vertical motion tests
in order to evaluate the performance the buoyancy engine.
After the completion of the design of the buoyancy engine
we are moving towards the hydrodynamic design of the glider.
The design philosophy is to be able to build several glider
hulls with significantly different hydrodynamic characteristics
and reuse the electromechanical “internals” of the glider. This
approach allows for experiments with uncommon designs such
as flying wings or hybrid gliders (added propeller propulsion,
see Figure 8) at a reasonable cost.
V. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors would like to thank the Office of Naval Research for supporting our research for AOSN-II under research
grants N00014-02-1-0826 and N00014-02-1-0861. We would
also like to acknowledge the whole AOSN-II team for their
support and insightful discussions that made the experiments
such a success. The authors would also like to thank Christopher Williams, Brad de Young and Fraser Davidson for their
roles in carving out a plan for NOOMPF.