A Study of an Unmanned Surface Vehicle System for Marine Environmental Monitoring

Abstract

Recently, drones have been widely used in various fields. The most active field is aviation drones, where various drones are used in combat to conduct unmanned surveillance and attacks, and in recent years the US military has trained drones pilots. In addition, it is used in various fields such as forest fire monitoring, border surveillance, broadcasting, aerial surveys, environmental monitoring, and courier delivery. In recent years, the range of applications for personal use and leisure has been widening. The next most frequently used field is the automotive sector. In the case of vehicles, autonomous navigation is added to general automobiles, and unmanned vehicles are expected to be realized within 10 years. On the other hand, the use of drones in the marine sector is somewhat lower than in aviation or the field of vehicles. In particular, many companies are conducting research and development in the aviation and automobile fields, but only a few representative companies are conducting research and development in the marine field. Conventional marine drones are mostly utilized in the public and military fields, but MR-SENTINEL proposed in this paper is a system used for private sector such as aqua farming and marine environmental monitoring. The MR-SENTINEL designed and developed in this paper uses an electric propulsion motor with a length of 3 m. MR-SENTINEL’s communication system basically uses WiFi and enables free operation without additional communication fee. In addition, existing systems used expensive sensors, but MR-SENTINEL uses low-cost sensors to lower the price, so it can be widely used in the private sector.