Study on Unmanned Surface Vehicles used for Environmental Monitoring in Fragile Ecosystems

The advancement of Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV) leads to new uses of these tools, such as environmental monitoring in areas where mobile sensors couldn't be deployed, or in-situ sampling took too long. Thus, high quantities of geographical and temporal information can be obtained. The need for such monitoring devices is accentuated in fragile ecosystems that suffer from regular pollution events, eutrophication, or frequent microbiological pollution episodes. The main goal of this paper is to provide a comprehensive analysis on how USVs had helped before in these kinds of environments in order to help us propose a better new solution, based on Artificial Intelligence (AI), that will be able to identify pollution sources, map the environment impact and be an analysis tool for the further research of these ecosystems. The degree of innovation must increase in a domain with so much potential. We propose to use the blockchain technology to add trust and traceability to the flow of sensor data, ensuring at the same time privacy conforming with the GDPR. Our solution aims to use an embedded AI system to provide automated piloting with the assistance Machine Learning (ML) algorithms.