Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV)

The University of South Florida's Unmanned Surface Vehicle was originally developed as a low cost alternative for testing and deploying environmental and oceanographic instrumentation under development at USF.  The incorporation of commercial off the shelf components has kept development costs low and has provided a high level of reliability.

The Unmanned Surface Vehicle is a catamaran design with a central T shaped chassis that supports the instrumentation, power, communications and the control system. The three hundred and fifty pounds of buoyancy is provided by two six foot polyethylene pontoons. 

One focus for our group at USF is to increase the use of USV's as environmental monitoring tools.  The current USV has deployed numerous instrumentation packages under various conditions. Some of these instruments are listed below;