Development of a Hybrid Solar and Wind-Powered Long-Range Unmanned Ocean Stereo Exploration Vessel

Abstract

Aimed at the problems of unmanned marine exploration vessels, such as the short voyage time and the limited sensing ability caused by sensor failure under complex marine environments, a long-range unmanned ocean-air stereo exploration vessel driven by wind and solar energy is developed. An elevating ducted wind turbine is designed for high efficiency and low starting wind speed, and a deployable solar photovoltaic power generation system is developed. Therefore, wind power and solar energy can be utilized to realize a hybrid system, which overcomes the instability of single energy power supply, and effectively ensures the endurance of unmanned exploration vessel. Then, a ship-borne tethered ummanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system is developed with an autonomous takeoff and landing control section. Finally, the information fusion technology of ship borne and airborne sensors is adopted to greatly improve the perception ability of the unmanned ship to the surrounding environment and the function of three-dimension detection of sea and air. The unmanned surface vessel (USV) proposed in this paper is permitted to perform the assigned task with different types of loading equipment according to the scenarios.

Keywords

• unmanned surface vessel (usv)
• long duration
• ship borne tethered unmanned aerial vehicle (uav)
• ocean-air stereo exploration
• ducted wind turbine