Cruising World - November - December 2016

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november/december 2016
cruisingworld.com
85
NAVOCEAN’S AUTONOMOUS SURFACE VEHICLE NAV2 COULD CHANGE
THE WAY SCIENTISTS COLLECT DATA AT SEA.
BY DAVID SCHMIDT
strong southerly breeze blew over the sleepy seaside village of Port Townsend, Washington, on the
morning of June 23, 2016, just in time for the start of the second annual Race to Alaska (R2AK), a
“human-powered” contest that takes racers to Ketchikan by way of Victoria, British Columbia, and the
inside passage separating Vancouver Island from the mainland. While other teams synced their starts
with the race committee’s gunshot, the Navocean team opted to let the fleet go before placing Nav2,
their autonomous surface vehicle, into the still-ebbing tide. Nav2 immediately started fetching her
waypoints while her creators followed astern in a RIB, hoping that the wind would hold and that their
tidy ASV would beat the next tide cycle.
An early prototype of Nav2 plies East Coast waters while collecting data for scientifi c research.
COURTESY OF NAVOCEAN

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