The Design of an VIAM-USVI000 Unmanned Surface Vehicle for Environmental Monitoring Applications

Abstract

Unmanned surface vehicles (USV) has become popular around the world with their capabilities in complicated and low-cost applications, also reduce the danger to humans especially in the environmental field. The environmental pollution situation is appearing more and more anywhere in the world, a large effect on the lives of people, economic development and national security. With that requirement, the design and implementation of USV systems is underway urgently but a few results have been achieved as expected. This article describes a USV’s design with flexible structure, easily integrated sensors for a range of environmental monitoring applications, and the developed control algorithm verified in simulation and experiment. Also, the hardware architecture of the control system is presented and the functions of all parts are clarified. And thence, the simulation and experiment results prove that the developed control system, strategies for waypoint guidance using light of sight (LOS) algorithm and PID controller have good performance and the feasibility, reliability of the designed control system.