Meander Based River Coverage by an Autonomous Surface Vehicle

Abstract: Autonomous coverage has tremendous importance for environmental surveying and exploration tasks performed on rivers both in terms of efficiency and data collection quality. Most surveys of rivers are performed manually using quite similar approaches. Using these practices to automate these processes improves the quality of survey operations. In addition to human expertise on the type of patterns,the coverage of a river can be optimized using the river meanders to determine the direction of coverage. In this work we use the implicit information on the speed of the water current, inferred from the curves of the river, to reduce the cost of cover-age. We use autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) to deploy the proposed methods and demonstrate the efficiency of our method. In addition we compare the proposed method with previous coverage techniques developed in our lab. When taking into account meanders the coverage time has been decreased in average by more than 20%. The deployments of the ASVs were performed on the Congaree River, SC,USA, and resulted in more than 27km of total coverage trajectories.