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www.seadiscovery.com Marine Technology Reporter 43Keeping costs down and having the ability to create more efficient mission plans is always a good outcome. MI: Yes and one of the things I think is great about these vehicles is that you can have one on every ship. If you have to enter a port that you have never been before you don't need to wait for a white ship you can just throw these things over the side and say OK here we are good to go or here there are three obstructions up the channel that we need to take care of before we go in. Again I am hearing a lot of this with the low cost of some systems and the ease of use. It really seems thesevehicles are opening up many doors for multiple appli- cations.MI: They sure are because Universities in Croatia, Singapore and all over the US are taking these things on board and pushing the envelope with new adaptations and behaviors. So we are learning as this huge group without all the costs and not to mention the glacial pace that hap-pens if it has to go through a program review with some Navy funded program. In the Navy the wheels turn slow and rightly so since there are tens of millions of dollars associated with a program. For a university that has bought an AUV for $100,000 and has 20 graduate stu- dents working on it, it is terrific because although you don't have the formal documentation that goes with it you are exploring all these ideas and doing great things to review if things are working or not. You now have 200 users out there getting all this data and working with the systems.Dr. Incze (left): Not all operating days are tough ones. Here we wait asthe AUVs are deployed and performing missions off the beach in Queensland, AUS. MTR#4 (34-49):MTR Layouts 4/27/2012 9:47 AM Page 43
