Development of an unmanned marine vehicle for autonomous monitoring and observation tasks

该项目的目标是设计和建造一种创新的无人海洋潜水器，以满足离岸操作员在监测、检查和剖面图任务中的需求。**该潜水器将在水面上操作，并具有潜水能力，在200米深的水柱中剖面图。它将能够依靠自己的动力和引导，在西北大西洋恶劣的海洋环境中运行长达数周。在水面和水下进行受控操作的能力对于无人驾驶海洋飞行器来说将是独一无二的。该飞行器上部署的传感器可以进行大气和海洋采样，使其非常适合于许多不同类型的海洋研究。其他传感器套件，如光学和声学系统的组合，即激光雷达和声纳，将使车辆适合今天和未来离岸工业的一些关键应用领域。这些任务包括但不限于冰山概况、海上结构检查，例如立管检查，或海上风电场支撑结构的自动检查。**这项工作的关键成果将是高度模块化的车辆本身，在车辆的特定设计元素中具有重大价值，例如使用浮力调整和主动矢量推力相结合的垂直剖面系统。模块化的有效载荷，即可互换的传感器套件，与运载器独特的运动频谱(即，任意用户定义的水下运动轮廓)相结合，使该运载器特别适合于围绕人造和自然结构的检查和剖析任务。**该项目的第二个主要产出将是远程操作员/用户界面。该软件将使操作员能够规划、执行和监测任务的进展情况，并评估车辆的状态，即健康监测。根据传感器套件的不同，所有数据将近乎实时地提供给用户，或者在高数据速率传感器(如摄像机)的情况下，将传输智能选择的数据子集。*

The objective of this project is to design and build an innovative unmanned marine submersible surface craft to serve the needs of the off-shore operators in monitoring, inspection and profiling tasks.**The vehicle will operate at the surface and also have the ability to dive, profiling in the water column to a depths of 200m. It will be able to operate, on its own power and guidance, for periods up to several weeks in the harsh ocean environment of the Northwest Atlantic. The ability for controlled operations at the surface and underwater will be unique for a unmanned marine vehicle. The sensors deployed on the vehicle enable atmospheric and oceanographic sampling, making it well suited for many different types of marine research. Other sensor suites, such as a combination of optical and acoustic systems, i.e. LIDAR and SONAR, will make the vehicle suitable for some key application areas in today's and tomorrow's off-shore industry. These tasks include but are not limited to iceberg profiling, offshore structure inspections, e.g. the riser inspection, or the automated inspection of support structures for offshore wind parks. **The key result of the work will be the highly modular vehicle itself, with substantial value in the specific design elements of the vehicle, e.g. the vertical profiling system using a combination of buoyancy adjustment and active vectored thrust. The modular payload, i.e. interchangeable sensor suites, paired with the vehicle's unique spectrum of motion, i.e. an arbitrary user defined underwater motion profile, make this vehicle particularly suited for inspection and profiling task around man-made and natural structures. **The second key output of this project will be the remote operator/user interface. This software will enable operators to plan execute and monitor progress of a mission and assess the state of the vehicle, i.e. health monitoring. Depending on the sensor suite all data will be available in close to real-time to the users or in the case of high data-rate sensors, such as cameras, an intelligently selected subset of the data will be transmitted.************