Abstract:Aiming at the shortcomings of traditional water monitoring methods, such as low sampling efficiency, poor temporal and spatial coverage, time-consuming and labor-consuming, a task-oriented automatic water monitoring unmanned surface vehicle (USV) and shore-based control system have been designed and developed, which can realize automatic and continuous sampling tasks at multiple points and regions in the target water area. According to the task requirements of water environment monitoring and the structure of the unmanned system, an unmanned surface vehicle test platform and it’s shore-based control system are designed and built. On the basis, the research on the multi-task path planning algorithm of USV is carried out, and the safety path planning method (SIA*)considering the constraints of environmental obstacles and the traversal search planning algorithm for sampling in open water are proposed. Based on the algorithms, combined with the automation requirements of water monitoring, the monitoring task process for the USV is designed. The test results show that the safety of the path planning is improved by about 1.82 times, and the regional cruise planning has achieved 100% full coverage of the task water area, which can meet the practical monitoring requirements of the sampling USV.