Charlie, a testbed for USV research

The Charlie Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV), originally developed for the sampling of sea surface microlayer and exploited in the Italian Antarctic expedition 2003–'04, in the last four years has been supporting research in the field of unmanned marine vehicles. In particular, this prototype vehicle allowed the experimental validation of algorithms and methodologies proposed and developed by different research groups cooperating on the basis of heterogeneous programs. The supported research mainly focused on embedded real-time platforms for robotics and industrial automation; modelling and identification; basic navigation, guidance and control; straight line and generic path following; cooperative mission control and path-following. This paper, after a brief description of the electro-mechanical design and general software, control and communication architecture of the vehicle, discusses the critical aspects, in the authors' opinion, in facilitating its use as a testbed supporting cooperation between different research groups: light logistics, integration with a hardware-in-the-loop simulator, execution control level automatically handling task dependencies and conflicts, task description in terms of I/O and state variables, standard and free tools for developing application code.