About thirty-five years ago, I (Jim Lynch, JASA EIC) worked on acoustic scattering from sea ice in the Nordic Seas, so sea ice scattering is a topic that I personally find interesting. One of the harder problems associated with sea ice is to determine its mechanical and acoustic properties over a large area. Upward looking sonars are one very useful technology to do that. Occasional, very expensive upward looking sonar surveys by submarines were employed thirty-five years ago, but these are too costly and hard to arrange to consider as a routine measurement technique. However, in the intervening years, autonomous underwater vehicle technology has developed to the point of being routine, and sonar sensors are commonly part of the sensor suites they carry. In Nick Chotiros’ article, simulations are made of how well such vehicle plus acoustics systems will perform in characterizing sea ice for a survey. Ocean acousticians always dream of having turnkey operations where our robots do the heavy lifting while we sit back and drink coffee, and this article discusses what may be just such a system.