Design of Low-cost Unmanned Surface Vessel for Water Surface Cleaning

Controlling and improving the water quality of riverway have always been a critical challenge and an urgent need in recent years. As a result, water surface cleaning is very important for ecological environment protection. In the last few years, a few researchers have proposed the usage of autonomous vehicles for water quality monitoring and water surface cleaning tasks. Facing the problem of surface garbage and floating material in riverway and small water area, an intelligent miniature water cleaning unmanned surface vessel (USV) is designed in this paper. The water cleaning USV can collect water rubbish using specially made guide rods, guide rollers, and collection bag. Besides, it is able to plan its full coverage path to complete water surface cleaning task in the whole region of interest. Moreover, LiDAR based obstacle avoidance is used to design safe path while cruising along. Finally, we carried out a pool test to verify the performance of the proposed system.