Design of an autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) for swarming application

Autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) is a versatile marine vehicle developed to fulfill complexity requirement of wide range offshore activities. Currently, ASVs are primarily developed based on the conventional surface vessel design in term of body structure and maneuverability capability. One of the today's ASV research interests is swarming application. The conventional ASV design has a limitation where it possesses large turning radius which is less suited for swarming purpose especially for a small area application. In this paper, a new ASV prototype is developed to accommodate swarming requirement and motion stability. Firstly, design requirements and the corresponding design methodology to achieve the aforementioned objectives are discussed. The practical aspects of the design are briefly presented and some related results from experiments related to the platform testing are presented. At the end of this paper, some future potential applications of the proposed ASV design are briefly highlighted.