Development of an Unmanned Surface Vehicle for Remote Sediment Sampling with a Van Veen Grab Sampler

Sediment sampling is one of the essential activities to sediment monitoring, and it is typically performed manually. However, manual sediment sampling has limitations such as inaccessibility, contamination, or unavailability of the equipment. Based on these limitations, there is a need to make such manual sampling remotely through use of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) that have been pertinent for various applications such as hydrographic survey and water quality monitoring with the growing advances in their technologies. In this paper, we propose a novel USV, the SMARTBoat 7, equipped with a Van Veen grab sampler for sampling sediment in water environments such as rivers, streams, lakes, and pond. We present details of the developed USV, including its physical specification and a control system architecture for remote sediment sampling. We validate the effectiveness of the developed USV through field experiments.