An autonomous deep ocean vehicle for acoustic tracking of bottom living fishes

A special submersible AUDOS (Aberdeen University Deep Ocean Submersible) has been designed to work autonomously on the sea floor in depths between 4000 m and 6000 m, to photograph animals attracted to and ingesting baits, to track animals with ingested transmitters, to measure bottom current direction and velocity, to relate these measurements with respect to a universal frame of reference in time and compass direction. The system must function reliably on the sea floor with no outside intervention. To this end, AUDOS has been developed in a modular form with gradual addition of new instruments. The authors describe the latest version of AUDOS incorporating a SCanning Acoustic Tracking EXperiment (SCATEX)