Combined Acoustic and Video Characterization of Coastal Environment by means of Unmanned Surface Vehicles

Abstract

The aim of this work is the exploitation of an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) for visual and acoustic characterization of the seafloor in shallow water coastal environments, through combined acquisition of echograms and video images. To this purpose, the employed vehicle is composed by two systems: i) a leading USV, equipped with an advanced mission control architecture, which performed a grid sampling over the study area; ii) a towed vehicle hosting an integrated system for acquisition of video and ultrasonic images, from the water column and the seafloor, coupled with a GPS receiver, which provided the geo-referencing of the survey. Data acquisition was carried out over different seafloor types, which included rock outcrops and sediments (mostly sand). The main key-points of employing such techniques to this peculiar field of coastal area monitoring are the possibility to perform automated missions and the capability to operate in very shallow water areas, usually not accessible to conventional boats.