Aqua swarms: Design and implementation of water surface AUV

Autonomous marine vehicles are remarkably useful for tasks such as shallow water surveying, environmental data collecting and military operations such as surveillance and weapon delivery. Because of the necessity for autonomous marine vehicles and the challenges they impose, they have gained a widespread interest among the research groups around the world. This paper presents a water surface autonomous unmanned vehicle which moves from a starting point to any desired destination while avoiding obstacles. Unlike many water surface unmanned vehicles this robots relies on oars for its mobility. This gives a greater control and precision in manoeuvrability while keeping the size of the robot as small as possible. This paper presents the hardware and software design and implementation of a dual-oar water surface autonomous vehicle. Comprehensive experimentation was conducted and results of the experiments are presented.