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Environmental monitoring of marine environments presents several challenges: the harshness of the environment, the often remote location, and most importantly, the vast area it covers. Manual operations are time consuming, often dangerous, and labor intensive. Operations from oceanographic vessels are costly and limited to open seas and generally deeper bodies of water. In addition, with lake, river, and ocean shoreline being a finite resource, waterfront property presents an ever increasing valued commodity, requiring exploration and continued monitoring of remote waterways. In order to efficiently explore and monitor currently known marine environments as well as reach and explore remote areas of interest, we present a design of an autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) with the power to cover large areas, the payload capacity to carry sufficient power and sensor equipment, and enough fuel to remain on task for extended periods. An analysis of the design and a discussion on lessons learned during deployments is presented in this paper.
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Dynamic Autonomous Surface Vehicle Controls Under Changing Environmental Forces
The ability to navigate, search, and monitor dynamic marine environments such as ports, deltas, tributaries, and rivers presents several challenges to both human operated and autonomously operated surface vehicles. Human data collection and monitoring is overly taxing and inconsistent when faced with large coverage areas, disturbed environments, and potentially uninhabitable situations. In contrast, the same missions become achievable with autonomous surface vehicles (ASV) configured and capable of accurately maneuvering in such environments. The two dynamic factors that present formidable challenges to completing precise maneuvers in coastal and moving waters are currents and winds. In this work, we present novel and inexpensive methods for sensing these external forces, together with methods for accurately controlling an ASV in the presence of such external forces. The resulting platform is capable of deploying bathymetric and water quality monitoring sensors. Experimental results in the local lakes and rivers demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1637876
- PAR ID:
- 10125479
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 12th Conference on Field and Service Robotics (FSR)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
