An autonomous surface-aerial marsupial robotic team for riverine environmental monitoring: Benefiting from coordinated aerial, underwater, and surface level perception

Abstract

This paper presents RIVERWATCH, an autonomous surface-aerial marsupial robotic team for riverine environmental monitoring. The robotic system is composed of an Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV) piggybacking a multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with vertical takeoff and landing capabilities. The ASV provides the team with longrange transportation in all-weather conditions, whereas the UAV assures an augmented perception of the environment. The coordinated aerial, underwater, and surface level perception allows the team to assess navigation cost from the near field to the far field, which is key for safe navigation and environmental monitoring data gathering. The robotic system is validated on a set of field trials.

Local and Global Motion Planning for Unmanned Surface Vehicle

“…We assume that , where -are some functional parameters, and the elements of the matrixes and are set by the following function (2) where t0 specifies the character of movement in the obstacle-free zone.…”

“…Field robotics is rapidly expanding into the aquatic domain [1][2][3][4]. Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV) are able to provide long lasting operation in the aquatic domain.…”

“…Proposed by the authors in [1][2][3][4][5] automatic control system allows to organize automatic motion of USV along the desired path. This article continues this work considering the motion planning process in an environment with obstacles.…”

A Health and Usage Monitoring System for ROS-based service robots

“…More detailed information, including field results, can be found respectively in the following papers: ECHORD-RIVERWATCH [13] [14], ROBOSampler [15], and will not be reproduced here due to space restrictions. The third application reported is, at the time of writing of this paper, still in development, namely the drawings are being simulated and validated.…”

A critical survey on marsupial robotic teams for environmental monitoring of water bodies

“…Marsupial robotic teams, that is, teams composed of robots that are able to carry other robots, are particularly interesting for the monitoring of water bodies. For instance, a marsupial team composed of a water surface vehicle capable of carrying an aerial vehicle allows, for instance, to join the wide field of RIVERWATCH marsupial robotic team composed of an Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV) and an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) [2]. view offered by the aerial vehicle with the endurance of the water surface vehicle [2] (see Fig.…”