Experimental Evaluation of an Autonomous Surface Craft for Shallow-Water Bathymetry

Abstract

AbstractVast coastal water bodies such as mangroves and wetlands, despite their enormous importance, are inaccessible to even the smallest aquatic vehicles, which are not capable of navigating the extremely shallow environments. To understand their behavior and the transport and exchange processes with both sea and land, it is crucial to study local hydrodynamics, which are highly dependent on bathymetric configuration. In order to obtain accurate and high spatial resolution bathymetric samples, an existing small surface vehicle instrumented with GPS and echosounder was implemented with an autopilot system to achieve autonomy. A description of the autonomous system together with the evaluation of the whole vehicle's performance in a natural coastal environment (e.g., affected by the wind, waves, and currents that exist in coastal regions) is presented. The navigation system is based on an autopilot system, which follows a set of user-selected waypoints to drive the vehicle through a previously designed path. The trajectory is self-corrected to achieve sufficient accuracy (the limits are also defined by the user) using real-time kinematics. The tracking is performed by two independent proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control systems: the boat's displacement speed and the bearing control. A simple experimental procedure to tune the low-level PID control parameters is presented. Comparisons between the bathymetric maps obtained with the system and with other standard bathymetric surveys from a selected coastal site (ship-towed echosounder) are presented to test both the precision of the boat's navigation and the fine structure of the bottom topography. The results confirm the system's capability as a valuable tool for surveying large and very shallow environments.