The ROAZ Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV) research program, focuses on marine robotics systems, namely design issues in surface autonomous robots, navigation and control problems, multiple (and eventually heterogeneous) robot coordination and environmental perception questions.
The application of autonoous systems in the marine environment for scientific, security, inspection and rescue missions is addressed.
Two autonomous surface robots where developed at Autonomous Systems Laboratory from ISEP - IPP (Porto Polytechnic Institute): ROAZ ASV a small size autonomous surface boat and the ocean operations ROAZ II ASV.
The autonomous marine surface robots were designed for environmental monitoring, bathymetry, science data gathering, search and rescue support and security missions. The ocean capable twin-hull ROAZ II has a set of sensors, ranging from thermographic camera, sidescan sonar to CTD allowing a diversified set o missions. The vehicles have performed several real operational scenario missions, from harbour security, bathymetry, autonomous AUV docking or ROAZ I technical demonstrations by invitation of the Portuguese Navy in NATO Swordfish06 exercises.
Comments (2):
Interesting!
using autonomous vehicles for marine data gathering.
The future oceanographic mission will need robotic tools.
Demo of RIEGL Airborne Bathy Scanner in Camcopter UAV
It's not an AUV but a UAV. So an unmanned vehicle, but in the air instead of underwater. This movie shows a demonstration of the bathymetric laser scanning capabilities of the RIEGL VQ-820-GU hydrographic airborne sensor in reality. For more information on the technical side, please see the news release on Hydro International.
