Combined Small-Sized USV and ROV Observation System for Long-Term, Large-Scale, Spatially Explicit Aquatic Monitoring

• Published in: 2018 OCEANS - MTS/IEEE Kobe Techno-Oceans (OTO) pp. 1 - 6
• Main Authors: Lyu, Bozhi, Zeng, Zheng, Lu, Di, Lian, Lian, Tu, Jiaming, Xiao, Linfeng, Liu, Yiding
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-05-2018
• Subjects: Autonomous vehicles; Base stations; Cooperation; Global Positioning System; Monitoring; Observation System; Prototypes; ROV; Task analysis; USV; Videos
• DOI: 10.1109/OCEANSKOBE.2018.8559206

In recent years, there is a tendency to use complementary autonomous vehicles with different capabilities in fleets for monitoring aquatic environments. Vehicle combinations could enable more complex missions with a wider variety of tasks to be accomplished. This paper presents the design and experimental verification of an observation system for long-term, large-scale, spatially explicit aquatic monitoring. The proposed system is comprised of a man-portable unmanned surface vehicle (USV) and a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), which are connected by an intelligent tether system. This system combines the main advantages of these two autonomous vehicles. These include the high maneuverability of ROV to measure water parameters at different selectable depths, and great endurance of USV to vastly increase the observing scale and range. In this paper, the mechanical and electrical design of the observation system is introduced in detail, and field experiments are performed to characterize the performance of the system.