3. AUV applications in marine geoscience
AUVs have been deployed in a wide variety of marine geoscience
studies, originally focused on seafloor mapping but more recently
expanding into water column geochemical and oceanographic measurements.
The first AUV specifically deployed for marine geoscience
was probably the IFREMER L'Epaulard AUV, which was used in the
early 1980s to map deep-sea manganese nodule fields (Galerne,
1983).