06 / FIELD OPERATIONS
A useful mission is repeatable: plan, deploy, survey, sample, recover, and explain what the data can—and cannot—support.
A crew establishes a launch point, surface GPS reference, water condition log, and recovery plan. The buoy carries the GNSS receiver because underwater GPS is unavailable; the tether and measured offset connect the surface position to the crawler.
The robot builds a sonar-led local map, adds optical detail where water permits, and flags PI anomalies as conductive targets. It samples only inside a known envelope, assigns a cartridge ID, and stores synchronized sensor traces. The map is a record of where to return—not a declaration that gold was found.
The crew retrieves the buoy and crawler, checks seals and leak logs, opens the locked tray, photographs retained material, and exports a mission bundle. A map of bends, depth, hits, and samples can guide a later human investigation and laboratory chain of custody.
A useful sortie leaves more than a rendered map. The bundle includes the route plan, surface GNSS track, tether geometry, underwater pose estimate, depth and turbidity series, sonar frames, raw and corrected camera frames, PI waveforms, pump/track currents, bladder pressure, cartridge IDs, operator annotations, and software/model versions. A replay tool should be able to show why the planner slowed, sampled, or aborted.
The field crew defines a maximum current, visibility, depth, temperature, debris, and tether-load envelope before launch. A logjam, culvert, rapid rise, entanglement risk, wildlife conflict, or loss of surface buoy is an abort condition. The robot is a research instrument, not a reason to enter unsafe water or disturb a protected site.