A Compact, Low-Cost Unmanned Surface Vehicle for Shallow Inshore Applications

This paper describes the preliminary design, implementation, and testing of a Police Robot for Inspecting and Mapping underwater Evidence (PRIME), an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) developed to aid and support police search teams in shallow-water and inshore reconnaissance operations. Manual processing of such areas can be time consuming and difficult, with dangerous debris and low visibility causing further hindrance in some scenarios. PRIME uses a combination of MultiBeam EchoSounder (MBES) and Side Scan Sonar (SSS) systems for high resolution underwater imaging. Additional navigational sensors provide PRIME with further data allowing for position control, path planning and autonomous navigation within complex environments such as inland waterways. Such applications pose significant design constraints, with the USV required to be compact and portable, relatively inexpensive and scenario-configurable. We present some approaches taken to address these challenges, based around a modular hardware and software architecture using the Robot Operating System (ROS) framework. Data gathered from field tests using initial prototypes for the detection of body-shaped test targets is also discussed.