Proceedings of the Thirty-second (2022) International Ocean and Polar Engineering Conference
Shanghai, China, June 5–10, 2022
Copyright © 2022 by the International Society of Offshore and Polar Engineers (ISOPE)
ISBN 978-1-880653-81-4; ISSN 1098-6189

www.isope.org

Design on Safety and Concealment of Wave Glider
Yingyuan Tian1,3, Weijia Li1, Zhigang Wang2

1. School of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering , Huazhong University of Science and Technology.
Wuhan, Hubei, China
2. Yichang Testing Technique Research InstituteYichang, Hubei, China
3. Qingdao Innovation and Development Center of Harbin Engineering University
Qingdao, Shandong, China

ABSTRACT

unmanned surface vehicles, it also has many defects and deficiencies.
For example, the carrying capacity is limited and is unable to get inposition quickly. The fatal defect of wave glider is that it is very easy to
be damaged by man due to its poor safety and concealment whilesailing on the surface. During the long-range sea trail of the “Sea Ray”
wave glider (Tian et al. 2020), it was illegally salvaged by fishing boats
or accidentally towed by fishing nets for many times. Therefore, theendurance of a wave glider depends largely on sabotage rather than its
system reliability.
The safety and concealment of wave glider is very important in manycases, such as during sensitive missions where the system needs to beprotected from detection or salvage. The goal of this scheme is toimprove the ability of the system to complete special tasks. Therefore,
it is necessary to improve the safety and concealment of the system
while sacrificing some other performance, such as energy, load andreliability. To maintain most of the advantages of wave glider andovercome its major defects, this paper presents a design scheme ofwave glider capable of autonomous vigilance and emergency diving.
The feasibility and challenges of the scheme are preliminarilydemonstrated.

Although wave glider has many excellent features that other unmanned
surface vehicles cannot compare with, and has a wide application
prospect, it is still a small unmanned surface vehicle with limited
ability. In practical application, the wave glider has many defects suchas poor resistance to sabotage, limited carrying capacity, unable to getin position quickly and so on. While the fatal flaw of the wave glider isthat it is easily damaged by man due to its low speed on the surface.
Therefore, the wave glider requires continued technological innovation.
This paper presents a design scheme of wave glider capable ofautonomous vigilance and emergency diving. The feasibility andchallenges of the scheme are preliminarily demonstrated, which
provides a way to improve the survivability of wave gliders against
man-made damage.

KEY WORDS: wave glider; security; concealment; autonomous
vigilance; emergency dive; sabotage.
INTRODUCTION

1 OVERALL SCHEME OF SAFE AND CONCEALED WAVEGLIDER

Since the invention of wave glider, this highly innovative unmannedmarine vehicle has been widely concerned. Due to its purely
mechanical conversion of ocean wave energy into forward thrust, thewave glider has supper endurance even in rough sea. The wave glider
can be deployed for periods of many months and travel great distances.
Sea trials show that the endurance time of the wave glider is up to one
year (Bingham, et al. 2012).
As an extensible platform, wave glider consists of a surface float
connected to an underwater sub with wings via a flexible umbilical.
There are many locations for sensors to be attached, including acoustic,optical, magnetic, etc. Based on the above characteristics, wave glider
can perform missions such as large-scale and long-distance sea surface
meteorological observation, hydrodynamic environmental parametermonitoring, target detection and cross-domain communication (Bensonet al. 2017; Van Lancker et al 2015; Greene et al 2014; Bingham et al.
2012; Daniel et al. 2011; Manley et al. 2010a; Manley et al. 2010b).
Although wave glider has many irreplaceable advantages of otherThe safe and concealed wave glider（SCWG） needs to solve threeproblems, include target detection, fast buoyancy regulating, stability
control of floating and diving. Target detection ensures that thesurrounding ships are not close to the warning domain and theforbidden domain of wave glider. In the limited time to avoid danger,
SCWG needs to realize rapid diving through fast buoyancy regulating.
At the same time, the stability control of wave glider is also very
important in the process of floating and diving.
SCWG has the functions of autonomous vigilance and emergency
diving. Combined acoustic, optical and electrical detection andAutomatic Identification System (AIS) are adopted to realize
autonomous detection of short-range surface targets. The seawater
pump buoyancy regulation system is used to realize the rapid
submergence of wave glider. The SCWG hovers at safe depth and1081