WG3: Piloting gliders and artificial intelligence

It must be stressed that control of the gliders via the Internet from all over the world through the main “gliderport” piloting infrastructure is essential. It is easy to imagine that hundreds of glider at sea for months requires manpower. This will be feasible only with easy and ergonomic access to piloting facilities, auto-pilot systems, flight control systems, automated fault diagnosis and environment information systems (e.g. maps of bathymetry, sea surface temperature, ocean color, currents). To integrate more groups and institutions, it is essential to allow the widest access to these facilities. A set of existing software interfaces, including those provided by the manufacturers, will be integrated in a peer to peer structure where distributed services can interact. Interoperability of the existing glider types will be guarantied. As explained above, automation to easy the final decision- making by the human pilots will be central in this WG.

Proposed deliverables:

• Development and integration of tools to steer fleets of gliders. Strategies for automated fault diagnosis assistance and solutions. Developments of techniques for retrieval of 4-D oceanic parameters from operational products to help piloting gliders.
• Portable Web based infrastructure open to any owner of gliders willing to include its instrument into coordinated fleets serving ocean observatories.
• Assessment of these tools for reprogrammable ARGO profilers.