Work

HAUV-USV Collaborative Operation System for Hydrological Monitoring

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Research in marine hydrographic environmental monitoring continues to deepen, necessitating a hardware platform capable of traversing air–water interfaces to collect vertical gradient parameters across oceanographic profiles. This paper proposes a deeply integrated heterogeneous monitoring platform for marine hydrological vertical profiling, addressing the functional limitations of conventional unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in subsurface monitoring. By co-designing a hybrid aerial underwater vehicle (HAUV) with cross-domain capabilities and a USV, the system leverages USVs for long-endurance surface operations and HAUVs for high-speed vertical column monitoring. Key innovations include (1) a distributed collaborative architecture enabling “Air–Sea–Air” cyclic operations; (2) dynamic modeling of HAUV-USV interactions incorporating aerodynamic and hydrodynamic coupling; (3) an MPC-based collaborative tracking algorithm for real-time USV pursuit under marine disturbances; and (4) a vision-guided synchronous landing strategy achieving decimeter-level docking accuracy in bad conditions. Simulation experiments validate the system’s efficacy in trajectory tracking and precision landing. This work bridges the critical gap in marine vertical profile monitoring while demonstrating robust cross-domain coordination.

Source: Journal of Marine Science and Engineering

DOI: 10.3390/jmse13081540

Authors: Qiusheng Wang, Shuibo Hu, Zhou Yang, Guofeng Wu

Institutions: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Shenzhen University

Language: English

Topic: Underwater Vehicles and Communication Systems

Subfield: Ocean Engineering

Field: Engineering

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $3,137

Funder: Shenzhen Municipal Science and Technology Innovation Council