Universitat Politècnica de València. Departamento de Informática de Sistemas y Computadores - Departament d'Informàtica de Sistemes i Computadors, Ministerio de Educación, Busquets, Javier, Busquets Mataix, José Vicente, Tudela, Dionisio, Pérez, Francisco, Busquets-Carbonell, Jesús, Barberá, Álvaro, Rodríguez, Carlos, García, Antonio Javier, Gilabert, Javier, Universitat Politècnica de València. Departamento de Informática de Sistemas y Computadores - Departament d'Informàtica de Sistemes i Computadors, Ministerio de Educación, Busquets, Javier, Busquets Mataix, José Vicente, Tudela, Dionisio, Pérez, Francisco, Busquets-Carbonell, Jesús, Barberá, Álvaro, Rodríguez, Carlos, García, Antonio Javier, and Gilabert, Javier
“©2012 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works., The challenge of extending the autonomy in AUV deployments is one of the most important issues in oceanographic research today. The possibility of maintaining a team of AUV under deployment in a defined area of interest for a long period could provide an additional source of information [8]. All this data in combination with the measures provided by buoys and sea gliders used for slow motion and long range operations will be very valuable. A group of low cost AUV's in alternative automatic switching system navigation-charging operation, could allow a kind of continuous surveying operation. This work is the continuation of the ideas that some of the authors previously presented in the AUV 2010 conference at MBARI [8]. At this conference was proposed the great interest for researching oceanic processes on two areas near Cartagena, Spain: cape Tiñoso and the Mar Menor a shallow coastal lagoon. Both areas require a different research structure configuration because of their opposite characteristics. The Mar Menor is a shallow salty lagoon 20 miles long with 7 m of maximum depth and particular features. This lagoon seems to present a sort of oceanic behavior and can be compared with the major oceans but a minor scale. The second area considered is cape Tiñoso, a very deep area in the Mediterranean Sea where the presence of a self-break provides an interesting potential for the research of the effect of upwelling currents.