Development of Spilled Oil Tracking Autonomous Buoy System

Abstract

Spilled oil from stranded ship damages not only the ocean environment but also the regional economics. In order to prevent such damages from expanding, we are developing a system using autonomous buoys. When the oil spill accident happens, several buoys are dropped into the sea. While the buoys drift along with spilled oil, those send some useful data such as its location, the meteorological and oceanographic data around them, in real time. According to the effect of wind driven water currents on the free surface, the buoys tend to drift apart from spilled oil. Therefore, the buoys must have the function of detecting and tracking spilled oil. In this paper, the concept of the buoy system and the mechanism of tracking spilled oil are firstly introduced. Then, the sensors to detect spilled oil are described. Next, the numerical scheme is explained to design the buoy and verify its maneuverability. Some experiments using a buoy model were carried out to verify the maneuverability and tracking ability of this buoy. These results show that the buoy could track the target by using the developed tracking algorism. 0-933957-35-1 ©2007 MTS As shown in Fig.4, DC servomotor rotates semi-submerged drum with constant frequency. To fulfill heave-free condition of this drum, some floaters are attached inside of it. It enables this sensor system to keep the draft of the drum 40 [mm] and 0-933957-35-1 ©2007 MTS J

Cooperative Distributed Source Seeking by Multiple Robots: Algorithms and Experiments

“…We design algorithms to drive a group of robots, which can only sample local values, to the source. Potential applications include source localization of oil spill [1], scalar field mapping [2], cooperative foraging [3], chemical plume tracing [4], multirobot radio source localization [5], [6], and cooperative path planning [7]. For a robot with the ability of measuring concentration gradients, a simple moving strategy by following gradient-ascending direction can complete the task.…”

Spilled Oil Tracking Autonomous Buoy

“…Table I shows the principal particulars of SOTAB-I. In 2008, we carried out some field experiments using SOTAB-I [6], [7]. The sea trials revealed the following points: (1) Contact sensor, which detects the deviation from spilled oil, could work well even if in the wave conditions.…”

Robust Performance Analysis of Source-Seeking Dynamics with Integral Quadratic Constraints

“…An alternative to the theory of IQCs is the framework of dissipativity which allows one to analyze the stability of the interconnection by searching for non-increasing energylike functions called storage functions. The results obtained from hard-IQCs can be interpreted with dissipativity based arguments and vice-versa 1 . This equivalence connects our earlier work [4], [9] on analyzing stability of source-seeking dynamics with dissipativity based arguments to this paper where we use IQCs.…”

“…Source-seeking problems are motivated by practical problems such as finding the source of an oil spill [1]. The abstract problem involves one or more vehicles located at arbitrary locations in an underlying scalar field with the goal of moving towards the minimum (or maximum based on convention) of the field which is called the source.…”