Advanced Manufacturing for a Mine Countermeasures
AUV Designed for Lockheed Martin by MIT Sea Grant AUV Lab

• CETUS (Composite Endoskeleton Testbed Untethered Underwater Vehicle System) is a new low-cost UUV for underwater intervention designed for transit/search and hovering/inspection
• Operable as AUV or ROV (Fiber-optic Tether)

In response to a request by Lockheed Corporation for the development of a flatfish-type autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) for mine countermeasures, the CETUS vehicle was designed and built at MIT Sea Grant's Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Lab. The vehicle is designed to be passively stable, easily controlled, and capable of hovering. We relied on our experiences with other Sea Grant vehicles, including Odyssey IIb regarding fabrication, and operational and performance expectations, to produce a vehicle which was not only inexpensive to manufacture, but also durable and easy to service.

Our final design, in comparison to the Odyssey class AUV's, has a single-piece HDPE (High Density Polyethylene) hull, formed using a rotational molding process. We employ two propulsive thrusters and three hovering thrusters, with no active control surfaces. The fabrication, from concept to delivery, was achieved in nine months.