Kongsberg completes factory acceptance testing of the first production long-range autonomous underwater vehicle system HUGIN Endurance
Kongsberg Discovery announced that the first production system of its long-range Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) HUGIN Endurance has completed factory acceptance testing.
Sea trials for the first production unit began in September 2023, and over the last months, the Kongsberg Discovery Uncrewed Platforms team has put HUGIN Endurance through its paces, verifying and refining all system capabilities. Sea trials culminated in March 2024 with a successful demonstration of the AUV capabilities to the customer.
HUGIN Endurance, launched in 2021, is the largest member of Kongsberg Discovery’s HUGIN family of AUVs. The system can come equipped with a wide array of standard sensors. This includes a wide-swath high-resolution synthetic aperture sonar (HISAS 1032 Dual RX), multibeam echo sounder (EM 2040 MkII), sub-bottom profiling system, colour camera, laser profiler, magnetometer and environmental sensors collecting data such as conductivity, temperature, sound speed, methane, and CO2 and O2 concentration.
In addition, the vehicle includes a large configurable volume that can be used to carry a mixture of batteries and custom payloads as needed.
The system is designed to allow autonomous operations directly from shore, and with a full complement of batteries, it can spend up to 15 days at sea, traveling up to 2200 km (1200 nm).
While the new AUV incorporates many of the industry-leading capabilities found in previous HUGIN vehicles, to enable long-term unsupported missions, new advancements had to be made, including greater redundancy, a new autonomous mission management system, greater situational awareness, and the ability to deal with a wide range of varying water density.
