Development and performance experiments in Lake Biwa of a small sensing device keeping fixed position on water

Marine and lake monitoring application have been received a lot of attention to monitor and study water environmental changes. We are developing a novel sensing device that moves to an arbitrary position or keep a fixed position on water for long term environmental monitoring. The characteristics of our device are low-power, low-cost, omni-directional movement and portability. In this paper, we present a long-term surface monitoring system of the robot, a prototype of the sensing device and a control system. The proposed device goals are to move to any arbitrary direction or maintain its positions autonomously in the ocean or lake. We executed multiple experiments which not only confirmed the feasibility of the concepts but also identified some issues with the control system.