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38 st / April 2015 www.sea-technology.com chaeology sciences for Parks Canada. "Having such an asset as part of our survey to locate the lost vessels of Sir John Franklin's lost expedition gave our search team a greatly im- proved capacity to successfully achieve our goal." ISE was proud to have contributed to the Canadian gov- ernment's search and study of this long-lost historical arti- fact. New Technology ISE continues to innovate underwater technology. A prime example is the progression of the technologies de- veloped for Arctic missions. Using the Arctic AUV version as a baseline, the variable ballast system was reimagined as an air ballast parking system on new Explorers. An AUV equipped with this system can park on the seafoor in a low- power state until it receives an acoustic command to con- tinue its mission, or for a fxed amount of time determined by the mission. The mission-override interface, developed for the Arctic homing system, has continued to be improved, leading to new levels of autonomy for the Explorer. Clients have added payload systems that can take control of the AUV's trajec- tory, then seamlessly transition back to a planned mission. For instance, Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN) uses mission override to test their qualitative navigation sys- tem, a fully autonomous path-following algorithm. "This feature is highly fexible and robust," said Peter King, of the MERLIN Lab at MUN. Experience with commercial survey operations has re- sulted in an onboard image generation system developed collaboratively with MUN. This system preprocesses sonar data into image tiles that can be viewed immediately upon recovery of the vehicle, or acoustically while the mission is underway. This allows operators to interactively change sonar settings or abort a dive if the equipment is not func- tioning. What's Next? With new autonomy technologies frmly in hand and the challenge of robotic applications in harsh conditions successfully overcome, ISE continues to be sought after for ideas and contribution to technologies on the horizon. One such thought process leans toward subsea resident vehicle (SRV) technology. This second stage of data transfer and ve- hicle recharge technique is a natural progression and fne complement to the Explorer AUV. Cost-effective measures are high here, which means the combination of the already high maneuverability of Explorer and the engineering and design of seafoor residency will soon be realized. n Gina Millar is a senior systems engineer at ISE. She has more than a decade of experience designing AUVs, ROVs and other robotic systems. In 2010 and 2011, Millar was part of the ISE AUV team conducting an underwater survey for Natural Resources Canada in the Arctic. She has a bachelor's in engineer- ing from Simon Fraser University and is a registered professional engineer with the Association of Professional Engineers. Millar was a speaker at Underwater Intervention 2015 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and OTC Arctic Technology Con- ference 2015 in Denmark. Linda Mackay has been the manager of marketing and communications for ISE for the past 10 years. She holds a bachelor's in marketing management from BCIT and receives daily education on the physics, design concepts and capabilities of ISE's subsea vehicles. She has consistently developed the mar- keting programs for ISE's platforms, assisting with their visibility to the offshore, military, science and research communities.