SWORDFISH: an Autonomous Surface Vehicle for Network Centric Operations

The design and development of the Swordfish Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV) system is discussed. Swordfish is an ocean capable 4.5m long catamaran designed for network centric operations (with ocean and air going vehicles and human operators). In the basic configuration, Swordfish is both a survey vehicle and a communications node with gateways for broadband, Wi-Fi and GSM transports and underwater acoustic modems. In another configuration, Swordfish mounts a docking station for the autonomous underwater vehicle Isurus from Porto University. Swordfish has an advanced control architecture for multi-vehicle operations with mixed initiative interactions (human operators are allowed to interact with the control loops).