The industry has experienced significant growth and the AUV can now boast as being the system of choice for various applications: it is unrivalled in mine countermeasures in very shallow waters, and deep-water offshore oil and gas geophysical mapping.

This product survey reveals a mature industry with established concepts of operations requiring relatively small operational crews. AUV users can now integrate almost any payload sensor and mount it on the world's most stable platforms.

The survey also shows how new vehicle concepts are already starting to offer the ability to carry out new tasks, from the inspection of ship hulls to pipelines. With advances in sensor technology, software capabilities, batteries and vehicle design, the future of the industry should present many opportunities for growth.

We define the concept of AUVs for this survey as ‘unmanned underwater vehicles with no physical link between them and a surface vessel'. There are some concepts that come close to our AUV definition, but in reality are different - which would make for an illogical comparison with the main products we are looking at in this survey, such as gliders (in this survey, we only received data for the Bluefin Spray Glider) and a semi-submersible underwater vehicle (ISE's Dorado), propelled by a diesel engine. You can find their specifications in the full online edition of this product survey.

Due to space constraints on these pages, we made a selection of the most successful models for each manufacturer. All other models submitted you can find online (81).

For our product surveys, we rely on all data to be provided by the suppliers. We thank all the participating manufacturers for their efforts in collecting the details that make this comparison possible

Acronyms used:

ADCP = acoustic Doppler current profiler; AHRS = attitude and heading reference system; ASW = anti-submarine warfare; CT = conductivity-temperature; CTD = conductivity-temperature-depth; DGPS = differential GPS; DVL = Doppler velocity log; GPS = global positioning system; GUI = graphical user interface; IMU = inertial measurement unit; INS = inertial navigation sensor; ISR = intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; ITAR = International Traffic in Arms Regulations; LBL = long baseline; MBES = multi-beam echosounder; MCM = mine countermeasures; OAS = obstacle avoidance system; ORP = oxygen reduction potential; RDF = radio direction finder; REA = rapid environmental assessment; RHIB = rigid hull inflatable boat; RIB = rigid inflatable boat; SAS = synthetic aperture sonar; SBL = short baseline; SBP = sub-bottom profiler; SLBL = synthetic long baseline; USBL = ultra-short baseline.