Georgy Kolev, a second-year master’s student of Saint Petersburg Electrotechnical University (ETU-LETI), has proposed using an autonomous bota as a solution to the problem of water body monitoring. The project of a second-year master’s student of the Faculty of Computer Science and Technology of ETU “LETI” won the UMNIK competition. The young researcher will implement it using a grant under the guidance of Denis Butusov, Director of the Youth Research Institute.
The boat is designed to monitor water areas within 50 km from the mobile base. It is 125 cm long, weighs 25 kg, and has navigation and computer vision systems and an electric engine with Li-ion batteries, complemented with a solar battery module if necessary. It can be used in hydrographic and rescue operations, ecological monitoring of natural and artificial water bodies. The payload of the boat is up to 15 kg.
The modular design of the boat makes it easy to adapt it for various tasks using additional
subsystems. Researchers have already successfully tested the prototype in Lake
Ladoga.
“The advantage of the boat is its relatively small size, allowing transportation by car, and low cost. We have conducted another round of field tests recently. At the moment, we develop a more advanced version of the boat, while the current one will be used for debugging navigation and computer vision systems. We also conducted hydrodynamic tests on the efficiency of propellers of different shapes, evaluating the propeller thrust direction and maximum rpm. The propellers were modeled in the CAD program and printed using a 3D printer,” says the developer of the boat.
The boat will be interesting for small fish-farming companies, which are currently monitoring water areas manually, using motorboats equipped with the necessary sensors,
which leads to additional pollution of water and financial costs.