Development of an autonomous aquatic vehicle employed on special activities

This paper describes the development of an autonomous marine vehicle based on a trimaran structure, introducing the ship structure, the main control system and each of the subsystems onboard, including energy storage system, propulsion and sensors equipment. The main goal is to achieve high effectiveness to extend the mission capabilities of the vehicle through several techniques such as combining motion control and energy control, applying hybrid propulsion of a permanent magnet synchronous machine and a sail. The vehicle that is under development will be employed, firstly, in marine protected areas, bays, reefs, reservoirs. Further, based on the experience with this vehicle, a new and bigger marine vehicle will be developed in order to expand the research in open sea.