A Mixed Aquatic And Aerial Multi Robot System For Environmental Monitoring

This work supports a research program that seeks to radically improve the monitoring and physical collection of harmful algal blooms. The proposed system will outperform current manual, aerial, and satellite observations in both spatial and temporal resolution, via the coordination of unmanned aerial vehicles and unmanned surface vehicles in a collaborative heterogeneous robotic swarm system. In this thesis research, a low-cost highly scalable prototype for autonomously monitoring and mitigating the algal blooms is being developed and tested experimentally. New contributions include development and programming of a scalable low-cost agent-to-agent wireless communication platform. The unmanned surface vehicles are studied with different autonomous navigation patterns for target detection, to improve the overall process efficiency. Initial field experiments are performed with the autonomous boat platforms to establish ground truths on the hardware level.