Maritime Domain Awareness Using Low-Cost, Long-Range Autonomous Surface Vehicles

International interest into improving Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) has spurred various solutions for gathering information and intelligence on the seas. MDA is “the effective understanding of anything associated with the maritime domain that could impact security, safety, the economy, or the marine environment” [1]. This paper presents a framework for analyzing sensors and addresses the viability of low-cost autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) that provide an MDA solution at affordable costs compared to exquisite autonomous systems. While MDA generally involves sensor inputs from multiple domains, the scope of this analysis is limited to surface sensing and the trade-offs between low-cost and robust ASV architectures.