Alistar 3000: a multipurpose AUV for the offshore industry

ECA company has been producing underwater vehicles over the past twenty years for civilian activities. Now, ECA is introducing ALISTAR 3000, a new multipurpose AUV for inspection missions, intervention and survey. Amongst others, ALISTAR 3000 is devoted to applications such as acoustic cartography, inspection of structures, generation of optical mosaics... The paper first presents the vehicle design and its autonomy capabilities including: - the power system based on the new Li/Ion technology enhancing the AUV endurance; - the high performance navigation system, based on Doppler-Inertial navigation fusion and GPS for surface initialization and positioning; - the vehicle positioning system based either on acoustic GIB buoys or on Ultra-short Baseline; - the automatic control management including hierarchically a Mission Management System, a Guidance level, an auto-pilot controlling the vehicle on four degrees of freedom; - MMI operator. The paper then exhibits results of ALISTAR sea trials and concludes on the new AUV performances and coming-up applications. (authors)