Experimental evaluation of a hydrography surface vehicle in four navigation modes

Considering the effectiveness of maritime transportation, a large number of world's trade is carried by sea and ports. Monitoring ports and harbors are essential for 24 hourly loading/unloading of ships. In this regard, bathymetry and monitoring of depth data especially in real time manner would be very valuable and worthy. To plot hydrography map of ports and harbors in the bureau as online and with low cost, a Surface Vehicle (SV) is designed and developed. This vehicle could navigate in four modes. Operator could seat on the boat and run by joystick or stand in slipway and control by Remote Controller (RC) or seat in the office and navigate by a user friend graphical interface. Finally the boat could navigate fully autonomous without any supervision. Comparison accuracy and precision of four mentioned navigation modes was the main objective of this research. Experimental results illustrated that autonomous mode with Standard Deviation (SD) of below 0.5 m was the most precision and comfortable mode, while RC is the more reliable and trustworthy.