Design and development of autonomous amphibious unmanned aerial vehicle for in situ water quality assessment and water sampling

Manoharan, Dinesh; Gajendran, C.; Padmanabhan, M.K.; Vignesh, S.; Rajesh, S.; Bhuvaneshwaran, G.D.

doi:10.1139/juvs-2020-0036

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 10 publications

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“…The automatic operation and navigation of amphibious vehicles have received less attention in existing studies compared to the self-driving technology in cars, 1,2 and automatic navigation technology 3,4 of vessels. Although amphibious robots [5][6][7] are small, they have been studied scarcely, and even those studies have not focused on the automated conveyance of multiple passengers. Therefore, we worked on this novel premise to construct an autonomous, amphibious sightseeing bus with a capacity of 45 passengers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

World’s first self-driving amphibious bus

Watabe¹,

Wada²,

Shimizu³

et al. 2022

IRATJ

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Amphibious buses are extensively used worldwide for transporting people to and from tourist attractions across water and land. Although numerous studies on self-driving technologies have been reported, research on the automatic operation and navigation of an amphibious vehicle has been sparse; moreover, owing to the size of the amphibious vehicles, automatic transport of multiple people is not possible. Therefore, in this study, we attempted to realize unmanned operation of a sightseeing amphibious bus for 45 passengers. The bus was outfitted with a by-wire system. On the vessel side, an actuator, similar to that used in JOY cars, was installed to turn the captain’s steering wheel. We also developed a software for the automatic operation and navigation of the bus. The relationship between the car’s steering-wheel angle and the front-tire angles is linear, whereas that between the captain’s steering-wheel angle and the vessel’s rudder-plate angle is not (and was approximated with a sixth-order polynomial). Furthermore, Autoware—a leading autonomous-driving software utilizing model-based predictive control algorithms to control the steering wheel of automobiles—was employed in this work. These algorithms were altered using Nomoto’s KT vessel model equation to improve the accuracy of vessel-path tracking. To the best of our knowledge, till date, no studies have documented the functioning of self-driving vessels using predictive controls based on Nomoto’s KT vessel model equation. In accordance with the vessel navigation rules based on the Autoware obstacle avoidance logic, LiDAR, cameras, and sonars were employed to detect obstructions and give-way paths. Thus, we successfully demonstrated the working of world's first self-driving amphibious bus, with automated controls for entering/exiting water and during give-way operations.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

World’s first self-driving amphibious bus

Watabe¹,

Wada²,

Shimizu³

et al. 2022

IRATJ

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Design and mathematical modeling of an amphibious quadcopter for versatile operations

Hosur,

Chikkanna,

Buradi

et al. 2024

AIP Advances

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Amphibious drone is an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) capable of performing in both air and under water for application in various fields, such as marine, military, and underwater habitat research, but complexity in the design and provable mathematical model to withstand the arguably swift changes in the forces during the transition phase makes it difficult to build a sustainable UAV that can operate seamlessly in both media. Beginning with the mathematical principles and physical laws, the basic concept of operation is arrived at in the present study for both media (air and water) keeping the prime objective as developing a reliable drone design and mathematical model that will satisfactorily describe the behavior of the amphibious drone with accuracy by defining the coordinate system to describe the amphibious drone’s kinematics. Basic forces and torques are considered to explicitly describe the drone dynamics using Newton–Euler equations, and the final equation derived is the matrix Newton’s second law. Based on the mathematical model, the final design of the drone is arrived at considering the feasibility of withstanding forces, placement of commercial-off-the-shelf components, and the amount of thrust required to carry the seamless operation. A prototype is built with active buoyancy control technique to control the underwater depth of the drone, which clearly satisfies the design and mathematical model developed in this study.

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