The frontiers of oceanographic survey and environmental monitoring have been expanded with the rapid development of Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs). This report presents the design and construction of a USV based on the ArduSub firmware. Through a stable control architecture and MAVLink communication, the system can be customized for surface applications. The proposed system consists of a modular vehicle design, a high-rate data transmission link implemented using the Pymavlink, and a remote control via the standard joystick protocols. In order to enhance the performance of motion estimation, the triaxial accelerometer is calibrated using the nine-parameter ellipsoid fitting technique, which removes bias, scale factors, and axis misalignment errors. The system is also scalable, providing opportunities for future development in autonomous navigation and multi-sensor integration.
Zhu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.