Dynamic Autonomous Surface Vehicle Controls Under Changing Environmental Forces
This addresses the challenge of precise ASV navigation in coastal and moving waters for applications like bathymetric and water quality monitoring, representing an incremental improvement in domain-specific control methods.
The paper tackled the problem of controlling Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs) in dynamic marine environments affected by currents and winds, presenting novel sensing and control methods that enable accurate maneuvering for monitoring tasks, with experimental results in lakes and rivers demonstrating feasibility.
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 (ASVs)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 local lakes and rivers demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.