Ch.13, Autonomous Sea Surface Vehicles, Springer Handbook of Ocean Engineering

Capitalizing on the experience and technology developments gained with underwater autonomous vehicles, the current research frontier in the field of autonomous marine vehicles has moved from under water to the sea surface, i. e., autonomous sea surface vehicles. Current and future perspectives of these types of autonomous vehicles are given in Sect. 13.1, with particular attention paid to US navy current interests. These were initiated a decade ago and still actively drive developments in this sector. The ability to design craft specialized for particular tasks to reach the best performance at sea, going beyond size and operational/safety limitations currently imposed by manned ships, offers unique opportunities to the naval architect. In this respect, the basic naval architecture principles that drive the selection of a type of hull with respect to operational requirements are given in the Sect. 13.3. The selection of the type of hull is a preliminary essential activity for the successful design or acquisition of an autonomous surface craft. Finally, as a practical example, Sect. 13.4 summarizes the main results of extensive research done at the MIT-iShip lab to develop a new class of autonomous unmanned surface vehicles, based on a highly specialized and optimized design of an unconventional SWATH (small waterplane area twin hull) hull, able to achieve superior performance and operational capabilities in real sea state conditions.