Enhanced Riverine Drifter

Existing riverine drifters are passive devices designed to capture, store and transmit river flow and bathymetry information. Problems inherent with passively drifting devices include the inability to maintain uniform cross-stream spatial coverage and lost drifters due to unintentional grounding and entanglement with various hazards present in a typical river environment. This proposal outlines a path to explore hardware and software solutions to improve overall system performance associated with the deployment of a small swarm of “intelligent” drifters. Modifications including propulsion, steering, river boundary detection and swarm navigation are presented and discussed. By leveraging this team’s extensive experience with the design, fabrication and operation of remotely operated and autonomous marine vehicles, a systematic approach to evaluating all available commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software solutions is presented. Improved deployment efficiency will be gained through better spatial coverage due to an ability to rely on inter-nodal range detection and cluster navigation achieved through complex swarm behaviors as previously employed by this team on other autonomous marine platforms.