Sustainable Solutions for Sea Monitoring With Robotic Sailboats: N-Boat and F-Boat Twins.

Strategic management and production of internal energy in autonomous robots is becoming a research topic with growing importance, especially for platforms that target long-endurance missions, with long-range and duration. It is fundamental for autonomous vehicles to have energy self-generation capability to improve energy autonomy, especially in situations where refueling is not viable, such as an autonomous sailboat in ocean traversing. Hence, the development of energy estimation and management solutions is an important research topic to better optimize the use of available energy supply and generation potential.

High-Level Path Planning for an Autonomous Sailboat Robot Using Q-Learning.

Path planning for sailboat robots is a challenging task particularly due to the kinematics and dynamics modelling of such kinds of wind propelled boats. The problem is divided into two layers. The first one is global were a general trajectory composed of waypoints is planned, which can be done automatically based on some variables such as weather conditions or defined by hand using some human-robot interface (a ground-station).

A Survey on Unmanned Surface Vehicles for Disaster Robotics: Main Challenges and Directions.

Disaster robotics has become a research area in its own right, with several reported cases of successful robot deployment in actual disaster scenarios. Most of these disaster deployments use aerial, ground, or underwater robotic platforms. However, the research involving autonomous boats or Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) for Disaster Management (DM) is currently spread across several publications, with varying degrees of depth, and focusing on more than one unmanned vehicle-usually under the umbrella of Unmanned Marine Vessels (UMV).

Towards a Real-Time Embedded System for Water Monitoring Installed in a Robotic Sailboat.

Problems related to quality (and quantity) of water in natural resources or in artificial reservoirs are frequently arising and are at the center of attention of authorities and governments around the world. Many times the monitoring is not performed in an efficient time frame and a precise manner, whereas the adoption of fast and punctual solutions would undoubtedly improve the water quality and consequently enhance the life of people. To minimize or diminish such kinds of problems, we propose an architecture for sensors installed in a robotic platform, an autonomous sail boat, able to acquire raw data relative to water quality, to process and make them available to people that might be interested in such information.