Unmanned surface vehicles, 15 years of development

To celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the Oceanic Engineering Society (OES) at the MTS/IEEE OCEANS 2008 Conference in Quebec City a series of review papers were requested from OES technical committee chairs. In response to that request this paper provides a review of the field of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) and autonomous surface craft (ASCs). The paper discusses the enabling technologies that have allowed USVs to emerge as a viable platform for marine operations as well as the application areas where they offer value. The paper tracks developments in technology from early systems developed by the author in 1993 through the latest developments and demonstration programs. The future outlook for USV technology is also described.

[1]  John J. Leonard,et al.  Protocol-Based COLREGS Collision Avoidance Navigation Between Unmanned Marine Surface Craft , 2006 .

[2]  Thomas W. Vaneck,et al.  Automated Bathymetry Using an Autonomous Surface Craft , 1996 .

[3]  Justin E. Manley.  Development of the autonomous surface craft "ACES" , 1997, Oceans '97. MTS/IEEE Conference Proceedings.

[4]  Jose Miguel Almeida,et al.  ROAZ Autonomous Surface Vehicle Design and Implementation , 2007 .

[5]  M. Grund,et al.  Experiments in moving baseline navigation using autonomous surface craft , 2005, Proceedings of OCEANS 2005 MTS/IEEE.

[6]  A. Pascoal,et al.  Vehicle and Mission Control of the DELFIM Autonomous Surface Craft , 2006, 2006 14th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation.

[7]  A. Martins,et al.  SWORDFISH: an Autonomous Surface Vehicle for Network Centric Operations , 2007, OCEANS 2007 - Europe.

[8]  Justin E Manley.  High fidelity hydrographic surveys using and autonomous surface craft , 1998 .

[9]  Massimo Caccia,et al.  Sampling sea surfaces with SESAMO: an autonomous craft for the study of sea-air interactions , 2005, IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine.

[10]  Justin E. Manley,et al.  Evolution of the autonomous surface craft AutoCat , 2000, OCEANS 2000 MTS/IEEE Conference and Exhibition. Conference Proceedings (Cat. No.00CH37158).

[11]  John J. Leonard,et al.  A method for protocol‐based collision avoidance between autonomous marine surface craft , 2006, J. Field Robotics.

[12]  C. A. Goudey,et al.  A robotic boat for autonomous fish tracking , 1998 .