Maritime Autonomous Vehicles: Methods and Measurements

The maritime domain is of an enormous interest to our society, from the economy to health, and security. Operating in the maritime domain, on the other hand, is dangerous, expensive, and most of the time at low execution speed. Unmanned systems are in many ways suited to such environments, but the successful realisation of maritime autonomous vehicles requires an overarching design and development cycle, starting from design and modelling of unmanned systems, to control and implementation exhibiting a reliable and explainable level of autonomy and self-organization amidst the sudden and possibly extreme disturbances occurring in the uncertain and dynamic maritime environment.

The aim of Maritime Autonomous Vehicles: Methods and measurements is to embed design and practice in the digitalisation process, which is currently revolutionising engineering approaches in many domains, governed by model-based engineering paradigms and digital twin concepts. The coverage of the book connects design processes, good practices and methods, specifying their interfaces and standards for real-world measurements.

Written by a team of top-class international contributors, brought together by an expert in the field, this book provides an entry point into the hot topic of maritime autonomous vehicles - methods and measurements. The reader is invited to take a guided tour of the state-of-the-art in maritime robotics, and highlighted topics in coordination, communication, control, biomimetic design, and the real-world application of artificial intelligence tool chains for underwater datasets. The book presents a sophisticated simulation or surrogate model framework capable of addressing the necessity of maintaining holistically the interrelation of the many details real maritime environments need to have in order to be accurately described.

This thoughtful and authoritative work is intended to be a valuable source of information for researchers and engineers from academia and industry, working in the fields of navigation, robotics, radar, and of course maritime autonomous vehicles.

Frank Ehlers is a principal scientist at the Bundeswehr Technical Center for Ships and Naval Weapons, Maritime Technology and Research (WTD 71) in Germany. He has worked as a scientist, project manager, program manager or principal scientist in German and international research institutes dealing with maritime technology for over 30 years. He has conducted both application-oriented research and more fundamental research in the fields of signal processing, detection, classification, data fusion, coordinated distributed sensor systems and autonomy for maritime scenarios. He is also the editor of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles - Design and practice (2020).