Sea Robot-Assisted Inspection

TLDR

Cooperation between the vehicles extends their capabilities beyond those of a single vehicle. The project offers a platform to explore the four roles of a marsupial team—courier, messenger, manager, and coach—while detailing the robot team’s design and demonstration of integrated system capabilities. The Sea‑RAI is a low‑cost USV that hosts a UAV, designed to inspect littoral environments and demonstrate integrated system capabilities such as seaworthiness, data display, marsupialism, and mission logging. The Sea‑RAI is the first known manportable USV that hosts a UAV.

Abstract

The sea robot-assisted inspection (Sea-RAI) marsupial robot team is the first known manportable unmanned surface vehicle (USV) that hosts an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The Sea-RAI is designed for inspecting littoral environments for military, environmental, and disaster-response applications. The project also provides a platform for exploring the four roles in a marsupial team: courier, messenger, manager, and coach. The cooperation between the vehicles extends their capabilities beyond the capabilities of a single vehicle. This article describes the robot team, details the design and construction of low-cost USVs, and describes the demonstration of the integrated system and the four key capabilities, such as seaworthiness, data display, marsupialism, and mission logging.