SailMAV: Water-Surface Locomotion and Biodiversity Monitoring

Existing aquatic robotic vehicles tend to be large, heavy, and difficult to deploy. This often renders them unsuitable for monitoring delicate aquatic habitats and hard-to-access areas. We present a comprehensive framework for the design and development of sailing micro aerial vehicles (SailMAVs), whose combination of flight and sailing capabilities is highly valuable for sensing missions in aquatic environments. This concept allows for quick hand-launch deployment from land, access to remote areas, rapid multipoint sampling at six locations, and easy movement between separate water bodies. Our framework places particular emphasis on the complex aero-hydrodynamic design, ensuring dual use of subsystems in both locomotion modes, which in turn maximizes performance and reduces redundant payloads. The small scale of the robots considered represents a particular challenge, in terms of both practical design aspects and the underlying physics. In addition to the hardware design, control laws are derived to allow for automated long-duration mission execution. To illustrate the proposed framework, a robotic prototype is presented, analyzed, and tested as an example. The developed design and control laws are validated in autonomous outdoor sailing missions, demonstrating the effectiveness of the framework. The prototype is further employed in remote sensing missions, demonstrating the use of SailMAVs for passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) of aquatic environments. The data obtained demonstrates the advantages of using micro aerial–aquatic vehicles (MAAVs) in biodiversity monitoring of aquatic environments with greater spatial coverage and reduced disturbance, when compared with manual methods.