The waters of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau are called tears of the earth by some literary and artistic works. How salty are “earth tears”? The autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) developed by our university can solve this problem. Recently, Harbin Engineering University, Tsinghua University and Qinghai University , go to the Tang Fan ancient path of Qinghai-Tibet plateau, using an AUV to detect and collect the water quality information of the Kubahai (Doucuo) and Heliqiao (Longyangxia Dam). This is the first time that an AUV is used to detect and collect water quality information in the plateau area, which is of pioneering significance.

Known as the water tower of Asia, the Qinghai-Tibet plateau is the source region of many major rivers in Asia and one of the regions with the strictest water management and water environment protection in China. Due to the warming and humidification of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau, the area of the lake on the plateau was increased and the salinity was decreased. In recent years, our country has been increasing the efforts to protect the water environment on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau. This investigation was organized to analyze the impacts of plateau temperature risen on atmospheric circulation, promote the protection and restoration of water ecological environment, and ensure the safety of water ecological environment in Qinghai-Tibet plateau.

In the past, the traditional manual method was used to carry out underwater layered detection on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau. A vessel was used to lay and recycle the detection equipment at different designated locations, which was time-consuming and laborious and greatly influenced by weather and other factors. Only water quality information of a few locations could be obtained by the method. The AUV is used to detect the water quality within its navigation range in real time, which is less affected by the weather. It makes up for the insufficiency of the artificial fixed-point data collection and saves manpower and material resources.

The AUV was co-developed by professor Yushan Sun's team from the Science and Technology on Underwater Vehicle Laboratory of Harbin engineering university and Tiejian Li's team from water and sand science and water conservancy and hydropower engineering laboratory of Tsinghua university. The AUV has a high degree of autonomy, which is able to carry out the detailed exploration of underwater hydrological information for a long time.

Under the guidance of professor Yushan Sun, six members of the team explored the hydrological information of the designated water area at different depths within three days, and obtained important hydrological water quality information such as topography, velocity, temperature, salinity, turbidity and pH value of the water area at one time. In this investigation, the AUV’s system withstood the test of the plateau environment and successfully completed the established task of the hydrological exploration of the plateau lake. The success of this study has accumulated experience for the detection of the plateau water environment and laid a foundation for the application of underwater intelligent unmanned equipment in the plateau research field.