ALSEAMAR has completed delivery of Voice of the Ocean’s (VOTO) first order of five SEAEXPLORER 200 underwater gliders, following the handover of the final unit in Gothenburg on 13 October 2026. The first glider of the batch was delivered in November 2025, and the order was developed through roughly four years of collaboration between VOTO’s operational teams and ALSEAMAR’s engineers.

A glider built for shallow, stratified seas

The SEAEXPLORER 200 is an autonomous underwater glider designed for coastal and shallow waters between 5 and 200 metres deep. Its specification was shaped directly by VOTO’s experience flying deep-ocean gliders in the shallow, strongly stratified waters of the Baltic Sea, where conventional 1,000-metre-rated platforms consume energy far faster than their design envelope assumes.

Compared with deeper-rated gliders, the SEAEXPLORER 200 is markedly more energy efficient in shallow water. Rated endurance reaches 75 days on a single battery, or 135 days with the double-battery option — up to 2,500 kilometres of range. It can be launched directly from shore, is compatible with SEAEXPLORER 1000 payloads, and works with ALSEAMAR’s GLIMPSE piloting and data collection interface.

Operational impact: fewer missions, more data

For VOTO, the practical effect is a change of logistics: recovery and redeployment intervals stretch from every three weeks to every two months. The foundation’s existing 1,000-metre-rated fleet collects around 100,000 vertical water-column profiles per year; with a shallow-water fleet, the same science could be delivered on roughly a third of the missions — and scaled up to several times today’s coverage.

Since its delivery, the first SEAEXPLORER 200 has completed missions across four Baltic basins — the Bornholm Basin, Eastern Gotland Basin, Arkona Basin and Northern Baltic Proper — and was deployed with SMHI, IOW and FMI experts to capture early signs of a rare major Baltic inflow in the Arkona Basin.

“Having a glider that is more efficient in the shallow stratified waters of the Baltic Sea, and also provides longer endurance, makes a huge difference in operational logistics and the science we are able to perform with them,” said Olle Glader, Head of Ocean Tech at Voice of the Ocean.

“Partnerships are essential to advancing ocean observation — by combining complementary expertise, we accelerate the development of innovative techniques that no single actor could achieve alone,” added Thibaud Bezacier, CEO of ALSEAMAR.

Open access and what comes next

The SEAEXPLORER 200 is available to the wider international scientific community, and data collected by VOTO’s gliders is freely accessible through its Observations Portal. The delivery follows a memorandum of understanding signed by the two organisations in November 2025 to advance glider technology and training worldwide. For connector and cable-assembly suppliers, long-endurance resident platforms like these put a premium on low-power, high-reliability wet-mate interfaces that can survive years of unmanned service without recovery.

RV POWER GROUP supplies wet-mate and dry-mate underwater connectors, penetrators and cable assemblies rated to 7,000 metres for oceanographic platforms, gliders, AUVs and subsea observation networks. For specification support, contact [email protected].

Source: ALSEAMAR — Voice of the Ocean’s first SEAEXPLORER 200 shallow gliders delivered (13 October 2026)