Control and Autonomy of a Water Quality Measuring Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) : Catfish project - Control and Autonomy

Sammanfattning: This report is about the implementation of autonomy and control on a water quality measuring unmanned surface vehicle. The project was termed Catfish and involved five teams focusing on different aspects of the initial goal to create an autonomous three-part system; a surface drone, a submerged drone and flying drone. In this iteration of the Catfish project the focus laid on creating the surface drone and submerged drone as the Catfish project will improve over generations of thesis projects. The author of the report was in the Control and Autonomy team and had been tasked with giving the surface drone the autonomy needed to make this project viable. Existing advances made in autonomy was adopted and tested. With the help of estimation algorithms, and sensor fusion, a flight controller navigates the surface drone between a set of GPS waypoints. It is also able to counteract the external forces wind, waves and stream to keep its position. To reach this autonomy four test phases were conducted on a pre-prototype with progressively increased difficult autonomy starting with manual control and ending in advanced autonomy. When the advanced missions were executed the speed and accuracy of two different thruster configurations were examined and the best performing out of the two was implemented on the final prototype the other teams had designed. The project ended with a fully autonomous system that was able to execute all the navigational maneuvers required to operate autonomous water quality measuring missions.