Networked Robots and IoT: Real Time Data acquisition at its finest

Rapid environmental assessment is crucial to promptly understand and intervene in extreme situations. It is also key to a technologically-advanced management of coastal and offshore infrastructure. Autonomous marine vehicles are essential to enable rapid environmental assessment in remote and harsh areas, such as the wave dominated air-sea interface, turbulent waters, mountain lakes, and other similar scenarios. Enabling autonomous monitoring in extreme environments is also important, because it allows the safeguarding of personnel, who can access the vehicles remotely, avoiding putting themselves in harms way. Stability, dexterity and modularity are the called for features in order to create an optimum autonomous platform. These characteristics combine well in the design of SWAMP, a catamaran ASV with a double-ended hull, made of lightweight foam, with a large payload and four azimuth thrusters. SWAMP, with heterogeneous sensing devices, embraces the Internet of Things (IoT), enabling precise and instantaneous data access, providing the experimental evidence of the reliability and operational capability enhancement given by autonomous and fully connected robotic systems.