Kongsberg’s First HUGIN Endurance Passes Factory Acceptance Testing

Kongsberg Discovery has completed factory acceptance testing of its first long-range Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) HUGIN Endurance.

Sea trials began in September 2023, and over the last months, the Kongsberg Discovery Uncrewed Platforms team has put HUGIN Endurance through its paces, verifying and refining all system capabilities. Sea trials culminated in March 2024 with a successful demonstration of the AUV capabilities to the customer.

The HUGIN Endurance program has attracted significant interest both from the defence sector and commercial operators. It can accommodate whatever kind of payload a customer wants, whether for seabed mapping or inspection, oceanography, continuous surveys of offshore wind parks, or as a surveillance tool for critical subsea infrastructure or changes in ecosystems.

HUGIN Endurance, launched in 2021, is the largest member of Kongsberg Discovery’s HUGIN family of AUVs. The system can come equipped with a wide array of standard sensors. This includes a wide-swath high-resolution synthetic aperture sonar (HISAS 1032 Dual RX), multibeam echo sounder (EM 2040 MkII), sub-bottom profiling system, colour camera, laser profiler, magnetometer and environmental sensors collecting data such as conductivity, temperature, sound speed, methane, and CO2 and O2 concentration.

In addition, the vehicle includes a large configurable volume that can be used to carry a mixture of batteries and custom payloads as needed. The system is designed to allow autonomous operations directly from shore, and with a full complement of batteries, it can spend up to 15 days at sea, traveling up to 2,200km (1,200nm).

While the new AUV incorporates many of the capabilities found in previous HUGIN vehicles, to enable long-term unsupported missions, new advancements had to be made, including greater redundancy, a new autonomous mission management system, greater situational awareness, and the ability to deal with a wide range of varying water density.