Development of Buoy-based Autonomous Surface Robot-kit

Abstract

Buoys are widely used in marine areas because they can mark positions and simultaneously acquire and exchange underwater, surface, and airborne information. Recently, the need for controlling and optimizing a buoy's position and attitude has been raised to achieve successful communication in a heterogeneous collaborative network composed of an underwater robot, a surface robot, and an airborne robot. A buoy in the form of a marine robot would be ideal to address this issue, as it can serve as a moving node of the communication network. Therefore, a buoy-based autonomous surface robot-kit with the abilities of sonar-based avoidance, dynamic position control, and static attitude control was developed and is discussed in this paper. The test and evaluation results of this kit show the possibility of real-world applications and the need for additional studies.