Research on Unmanned Surface Vessel for Meteorological Detection

Marine meteorology information is important for weather-sensitive marine activities while it is difficult to collect meteorological data in harsh environments. The objective of this paper is to design an unmanned surface vessel (USV) system, which consists of several subsystems, for marine meteorological data acquisition. Taking into consideration the reliability of the self-driving subsystem, a redundant autonomous driving module is designed to remove the broken controller. The stability and reliability of data transmissions are guaranteed by a multi-mode communication subsystem composed of radio and Beidou satellite communication modules. For the sake of the vessel safety, a navigation obstacle avoidance subsystem is employed in combination with vision sensors. The power subsystem including diesel generators and batteries is designed to extend the working time of meteorological monitoring. Moreover, an adaptive circular LOS guidance law is proposed to reduce the overshoot caused by the disturbance due to wind and wave. Finally, several experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the system. The results show that the USV with designed system is able to sail across the tough marine area while showing important advantages for the acquisition and transmission of marine meteorological data in real time.