Improvement of Combined Aerial and Underwater Drone System

Underwater inspection work performed by ships and divers is always dangerous and consumes considerable time and money. Safer and more efficient underwater inspection work is therefore an important issue. To address this, we developed a combined aerial and underwater drone system which we reported on last year. It enables remote underwater inspection over LTE (mobile network) without using a boat or diver. However, we encountered some challenges with the previous body structure and functions such as it was sometimes difficult to combine the system with the ROV, and being swept away by ocean currents or winds on the sea surface. Therefore, we have made improvements to the system to rectify these issues. Using the improved drone system, we conducted demonstration experiments in domestic coastal waters and confirmed that the improvements were effective in an actual marine environment. This paper describes in detail the improvements made to our combined aerial and underwater drone system.