The Aquatic Surface Robot (AnSweR), a Lightweight, Low Cost, Multipurpose Unmanned Research Vessel

Abstract

Even though a few examples of aquatic surface robots exist, they are generally expensive, relatively large and heavy and tailored to custom-made hardware/software components that are not openly available to a broad public. In this work, the Aquatic Surface Robot (AnSweR), a newly-designed, lightweight, low cost, open-source, multipurpose unmanned research vessel is presented. The An-SweR features a lightweight and compact design that makes it fit in a backpack. Low-noise operation (in and above the surface) is achieved with a propulsion system based on two water-jets. Only affordable commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components are adopted. The primary goal of the AnSweR is to map underwater landscapes and to collect bathymetry data in lakes, rivers, and coastal ecosystems. A modular hardware and software architecture is adopted. This architecture allows the AnSweR to be equipped with a customisable add-on set of sensors and actuators to enable a variety of research activities, such as measuring environmental variables (e.g., salinity, oxygen, temperature) and sampling operations (e.g., sediment, vegetation, microplastics). The software architecture is based on the Robot Operating System (ROS). This paper describes the design of AnSweR as the main scientific contribution and presents preliminary simulation and experimental results which illustrate its potential.

Autonomous inland navigation: a literature review and extracontractual liability issues

“…Autonomous vessels are not only developed and deployed as a means of transport for goods. They are used for environmental and water monitoring (Moulton et al 2018;Berman et al 2020;Chensky et al 2021), to collect marine meteorological measurements (Chen et al 2019a), to monitor and collect data from wetlands (Odetti et al 2018), to make hydrological measurements (Da , to map the underwater bed and collect bathymetric data from inland and coastal environment (Sanfilippo et al 2021;Dohner et al 2022;Marchel et al 2020;Mohd Adam et al 2021) and to perform hydrographic surveys (Stateczny et al 2018).…”

Design Process and Advanced Manufacturing of an Aquatic Surface Vehicle Hull for the Integration of a Hydrogen Power Plant Propulsion System

“…The hydrodynamic characteristics of UUVs have been reviewed recently [2], and the optimization of their hulls [3] has been performed for different operational conditions such as navigation at snorkeling depth [4] or for exploration in the Caribbean Sea [5]. Research and development on USVs focus not only on typical lightweight applications, like ocean research [6] or wetland monitoring tasks [7][8][9], but also on human transportation [10]. Aquatic vehicles compete with other unmanned vehicles in dangerous applications such as disaster scenes and surveillance tasks at borders, sensitive areas, and ports [11][12][13].…”