Talk:Underwater glider

The underwater glider is an old idea
The history of sea gliders does not start with Henry Stommel in 1989. There are various patents, describing underwater gliders, like this one: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/3157145.pdf dating back many years ago.
 * Good point. I added a sentence on Ewan Fallon's patent. If you take a look at it, you will see he expected the swimmer to change buoyancy by foot pump of a compressor.  As Jenkins et al notes, General Dynamics did some tests on the notion of a swimmer delivery glider, but the report they cited is also only mentioned as a footnote in a naval academy thesis and is indicated as confidential.  I imagine this was fallon's idea but we can only speculate the report's findings until someone eventually scans it it/ releases it.  I expect the navy figured it made more sense to strap some sort of cheap propulsion device on a craft than to rely on the low speed/ vulnerable to cross currents characteristics of the glider concept.  Anyway, if you look at the patents cited from the examiner on the hydroglider, there is mention of a submarine toy patent (submitted in 1959) (link) that had a similar idea of a compressed bladder.  What Fallon essentially did was make it man sized, and the glide controllable. I can't help but wonder about the actual prototypes built- with such a delicate buoyancy balance, achieving a dive must have been annoying with all the exhaled air bubbles from the swimmer's aqualung.  If anyone digs up that General Dynamics report, it might be interesting.  Here is the reference: Oversmith, R.H. and Leadon, R.E. “Concept Whisper”. General Dynamics/Convair, GD/C-62-206A, Nov 1962  J JMesserly (talk) 21:44, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

Defense contractors are snapping up the small independent glider firms
There is a major new, potentially useful, article in IEEE Spectrum this month. It includes lots of information on the transition of the underwater glider industry. (IEEE Spectrum is a major engineering publication, written for the intelligent layman.)
 * "This month, the U.S. Navy plans to announce the winner of a contract for 154 submersible robots called gliders, plus spare parts, launch-and-recovery equipment, and monitoring systems. The order, valued at tens of millions of dollars, has sent defense contractors racing to gobble up the leading glider technologies."
 * Here's the article title and the link:
 * Defense Contractors Snap Up Submersible Robot Gliders : U.S. Navy contract stirs interest in propellerless AUVs by Erico Guizzo, published September 2008.

I do not have time to update the main article with the new information from this so will leave that to other interested editors. N2e (talk) 10:16, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Robotics attention needed

 * Add refs
 * Update
 * Expand

Chaosdruid (talk) 10:24, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Arguable Neutrality
The article appears to show preference quite a few times in the section on the SeaExplorer. At the very least lines like "Last but not least" don't really, atleast in my mind, fit the overall tone of wikipedia.
 * I could not agree more. The paragraph read like a news release, and I understand that the contributor probably had good intentions in informing people about SeaExplorer which does have some interesting capabilities.  I made the passage more encyclopedic.  The original was heavily weighted with superlatives and promotional statements that were unsupported or of little informational value.  For example, what company does not create products that strive for reliability, latest generation technology, and operational simplicity?   It is true that some designs have superior attributes, but if the contributor cannot make a citation to some study that conducted impartial tests, then really that sort of material can be accessed via an external link.  I have no affiliation with any of these groups, and as far as I am concerned, there should be an article on each of the major gliders.  However any WP editor is going to insist that all material be non promotional with high quality citations (impartial third party authorities such as articles from peer reviewed journals).  J JMesserly (talk) 21:22, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

Splitting History and Project descriptions
I have added a bunch of material to the article but I'm not happy with how the structure stands. It seems to me that the History section should confine itself to a list of the major developments and their dates. A separate section would have descriptions of the different glider projects. There is a great deal of competition in this field so naturally I can expect there could be some dispute about whose technology represented what should be considered a major development. So I left the structure as is. If anyone agrees and wants to streamline the history and move the material to project descriptions, I think that would be a big improvement. If I see no objections and work on this article some months in the future, I may well make that sort of structural change. J JMesserly (talk) 21:55, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

Gliders that have some thrust capability
There has been a bit of blurring on what a glider is. For example, here is a design which extracts energy with a propeller that drives a generator:. The same propeller is used for occasional maneuvering, but the bulk of its propulsion is from gliding. Other designs are adding thrusters to gliders not for propulsion but for attitude control. So should the Underwater glider article describe these sorts of designs, or should these go in the AUV article? My feeling is that if the bulk of the mode of operation of the vehicle is as a glider, then it should be treated in this article. I expect that is not too controversial, but if anyone feels differently please comment. J JMesserly (talk) 21:46, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

Software description: Obstacle avoidance/ navigation/ Swarming/ Networked behavior
There ought to be a robotics section that makes some mention of the domain specific challenges that robotic software must grapple with. For example on obstacles, the problem of dealing with fishermen. On navigation planning, the problem of low velocity vehicles dealing with strong currents. For fleet operations and oceanographic studies, some authors are advocating swarming type software to coordinate gliders. Some of this swarming discussion is generic to non glider AUVs, but this article might give attention to the impact of the gliders' long mission duration capability on such software. Wood in particular wrote on this in the overview I cited. J JMesserly (talk) 22:08, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

Abbreviations best avoided
It's better to avoid abbreviations, for example an image caption read "at the med sea" but there's no such sea anywhere in the world, right? ^^ So I changed it to Mediterranean Sea. UW was expanded to University of Washington, and the capitalization of section titles should only have a capital in the beginning. Χρυσάνθη Λυκούση (talk) 17:29, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

External links modified
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External links modified (January 2018)
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Variable-buoyancy propulsion listed at Redirects for discussion
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Variable-buoyancy propulsion. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. Pam D  17:55, 21 May 2019 (UTC)

Navy's flying sea gliders
I stumbled upon this and it seems interesting. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2139875-next-gen-drones-will-fly-and-dive-into-the-sea-like-pelicans/

https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2015/03/duck-drone-could-spy-enemy-subs/108811/

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/14733/the-us-navy-has-created-its-first-ever-underwater-drone-squadron

and earlier demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mB99I5U7Ac Technophant (talk) 00:53, 12 August 2019 (UTC)