An Autonomous Surface Vehicle for Long Term Operations

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.

对海洋环境的环境监测提出了一些挑战：环境的苛刻性，通常是偏远的位置，最重要的是它所涵盖的广阔区域。手动操作是耗时的，通常是危险的，而且劳动量很大。来自海洋船只的运营昂贵，并且有限于开放海洋，通常是更深的水体。此外，由于湖泊，河流和海岸线是有限的资源，海滨物业呈现出越来越多的价值商品，需要探索和继续监视偏远的水道。为了有效地探索和监视当前已知的海洋环境以及覆盖范围并探索感兴趣的偏远地区，我们提供了一种自主地表车辆（ASV）的设计，具有覆盖大面积的功率，具有足够的电源和传感器设备的有效负载能力，以及足够的燃料，以保持长时间的任务。本文介绍了对部署期间所学教训的讨论的分析。