USV (Unmanned Surface Vehicle), applications and advantages

The Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV) or Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASV) are vessels that operate on the water surface without any crew. They are remotely controlled and can be controlled by an operator located on land or on board of another vessel. Thereby maintaining a first line of defense or performing inspections of other ships, etc. while manned boats are kept at a safe distance, avoiding unnecessary risks.

USV are valuable for oceanographic applications, as they are more useful than the weather buoys, but more cost-effective than the weather ships or equivalent research vessels, and more adaptable than commercial vessels. With them you can make bathymetry, exploration, and mapping of the marine funds and can make tracking of large mammals for biological studies. There are USVs that are powered by the energy of the waves and from their solar cells, achieving months of maritime autonomy.

The USV is usually resistant, stable, stealthy, fast, and highly maneuverable; normally, its main military application is to act as a maritime mobile target for military training and for tests of defense systems. But they have a wide variety of applications, such as protection forces, anti-piracy forces, anti-terrorism forces, surveillance and reconnaissance, electronic warfare, and mining.

In these additional applications, USV offers greater capacity for surveillance, identification, and interception compared to traditional systems. It can be equipped with stabilized weapons systems, surveillance systems, and electro-optical tracking systems capable of monitoring both day and night by using infrared vision.

Veronte Autopilot 1x integration on USV

Some of the main performance and capability increases of the USV powered by Veronte Autopilot 1x are:

• Fully autonomous control of the USV.
• Improved safety systems: no go areas and safe areas, configurable actions on a system failure or a data link loss (go home, system disconnect, shooting flares, light ignition, etc.).
• Ability to control multiple USVs as well as combinations of USVs with a tethered drone from a single control station.
• Veronte permits the configuration of missions relative to the control station, which can be located on land or on another boat.
• “Follow me” function for all kinds of tracking, as track of mammals, other vessels, etc.
• Veronte Autopilot 1x is compatible with all kinds of vehicles: solar boats, catamarans, motorboats, etc.
• Automatic routines are configured depending on the information captured by the sensors.
• Satellite communications with global coverage.