Development of a Low-cost Unmanned Surface Vehicle for Digital Survey

During last years unmanned ground and aerial vehicles captured the attention of researchers and companies, while the available set of Unmanned Surface Vehicle platforms is smaller. In many scenarios an integrated approach is required considering a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles. In this paper we focus on the development of a low-cost unmanned surface platform for digital surveys. The boat has been designed to navigate also in shallow water owing to a low draft design. An embedded system with Robot Operating System (ROS) onboard has been deployed on the surface vehicle. One of the main advantages of the proposed solution is its reduced cost owing to open-hardware/software solutions. In particular, an open-hardware solution is responsible for the interfacing of an RTK GPS with a bathymetric ultrasound sensor to map the sea/lake / river floor. The boat can be either remotely controllable or fully autonomous. An Augmented Reality (AR) application has been also developed to show the path and the set of survey blocks that are mapped/not mapped. The AR application is particularly useful when the user remotely controls the boat, but also for supervising the autonomous survey. The performances achieved in the first trials are satisfactory and the AR application produces significant maps.