Lessons learnt from 12 years experience of the launch and recovery of Autosub

The Autosub AUV project, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) has been used worldwide over the last twelve years, for the most part, using a purpose made gantry on a variety of ships for launch and recovery. Over this time, a history has accumulated of the system strengths, weaknesses, and maintenance and refit costs. We require a second system to allow simultaneous AUV use on separate ships. This will be designed to be a more compliant system, tolerant of high dynamic loads. We will also review the positioning of the system on the ship to minimise pitch and roll movements. The inherent dynamic difficulties in recovering AUVs are similar to those of ROVs and we would consider whether a common crane system with interchangeable lift heads would be feasible for use with either AUVs or ROVs, thus creating the benefits of a shared infrastructure.