Associate Professor Yusuke Yokota of the University of Tokyo and Takumi Matsuda of Meiji University have collaborated with Pro Drone Co., Ltd. to use unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) as mother ships for autonomous underwater and undersea observation equipment (autonomous unmanned submersibles, etc.). By operating it, it was clarified by a demonstration experiment that highly efficient and highly agile equipment operation is possible.
Positioning and communication of equipment for autonomous surveys of the sea and seabed are indispensable in many marine industries such as coastal and port surveys.Therefore, it is necessary for the observation equipment and the sea surface base to communicate information by acoustic communication.Most of the sea surface bases so far have been ships, and large costs and lack of mobility have been bottlenecks for widespread and generalization of observations.It is expected that the drone will be used as a sea surface base because the airframe and fuel costs are low and the human and time costs are very low, but there was an overwhelming shortage of demonstration cases.
Since last year, the research group has been developing an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), demonstrating the possibility of buoy-like measurement and underwater measurement on the surface of the sea.This time, as its development, we conducted a demonstration test of communication with underwater and seafloor observation equipment such as an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) and its work as a mother ship.As a result, it was confirmed that sea-level UAVs were communicated with each other in the coastal area, and communication of about 200 m was realized.It was shown that it is superior to the operation of equipment by ships in terms of the holding accuracy of the aircraft and the low acoustic noise in the sea, and it showed the great advantage of the underwater and seafloor survey in the coastal area using UAV.
In addition, this time, the development of UAV aircraft performance and power sources (batteries, etc.) that enable long-term operation, and the weight reduction of observation equipment that enables transportation will be the future highly efficient UAV underwater and seafloor observations. It was suggested that this is an important research subject.
Paper information:[Remote Sensing] Underwater communication using UAVs to realize high-speed AUV deployment
