Study on Autonomous Boat-Type Robot for Automatic Measurements of Velocity and Discharge in Natural Rivers - Field Performance Test in Small/Middle Scale Straight Rivers -

Abstract

The present study focuses on examination about field performance of autonomous boat-type robot. This epoch-making robot system allows to measure automatically velocity and discharge in small / middle scale natural rivers. A combination of the camera-tracking system and the Proportional/Integral/Derivative (PID) control could enable the boat-type robot to remain in position against the mainstream. This results in reasonable evaluation of the mean velocity by a duty ratio which corresponds to rotation speed of the screw propeller. We conducted also velocity measurements using electromagnetic velocimetry, and examined quantitatively measurement accuracy by the present robot technique.