SailMAV: Water-Surface Locomotion and Biodiversity Monitoring
Andre Farinha, Luca Romanello, Raphael Zufferey, Jenna Louise Lawson, Sophie Franziska Armanini, Mirko Kovac
AI summary
Problem
Existing aquatic robotic vehicles are typically large, heavy, and difficult to deploy, rendering them unsuitable for monitoring delicate or hard-to-access aquatic habitats.
Approach
The authors developed a design framework for small-scale sailing micro aerial vehicles that share control surfaces between flight and sailing modes to minimize weight and redundancy, supported by custom fluid-dynamic models and autonomous navigation controllers.
Key results
- Optimized hull geometry through small-scale fluid-dynamic modeling
- Novel control strategy leveraging rigid airfoil sails for near-any-direction sailing
- Autonomous navigation unit enabling upwind sailing and multipoint sampling
- Successful outdoor validation demonstrating long-duration missions and passive acoustic biodiversity monitoring
Why it matters
Provides a scalable, low-impact platform for environmental researchers to collect high-resolution aquatic data in remote or fragile ecosystems.
Abstract
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.