Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) has been used in many different areas including water monitoring, bathymetric surveying, port security, minesweeping and so on. In this thesis, a novel, man­‐portable, battery­‐powered catamaran USV that can collect water samples and track pollution sources has been developed. We have designed and implemented the whole system which consists of the USV, a Base Station, a Remote Control and a Central Server. The USV is 1.2 m in length with a working speed of 1.5 m/s for 6 hours. The hardware and software architecture including some implementation details of the complete system and the control system of the USV will be discussed in the thesis....[ Read more ]

Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) has been used in many different areas including water monitoring, bathymetric surveying, port security, minesweeping and so on. In this thesis, a novel, man­‐portable, battery­‐powered catamaran USV that can collect water samples and track pollution sources has been developed. We have designed and implemented the whole system which consists of the USV, a Base Station, a Remote Control and a Central Server. The USV is 1.2 m in length with a working speed of 1.5 m/s for 6 hours. The hardware and software architecture including some implementation details of the complete system and the control system of the USV will be discussed in the thesis.

A series of experiments with total autonomous navigation distance of more than 1000 km have been conducted. It has proven acceptable waypoint navigation and obstacle avoidance performance, and more importantly, demonstrated that through the use of unmanned and robotic technologies, water sampling and monitoring could be very effective and efficient.