This document reports the progress of the RIVERWATCH experiment from week 8 to week 16.

All tasks progressed considerably in this reporting period.

During the reporting period all the equipment has been selected and quotation requests issued.

The development of the simulation environment was carried out. It is composed of two modules, one responsible for simulating the presence of obstacles above the surface and another responsible for simulating the surface’s dynamics and the interaction of the underwater sonar beams and riverbed.

A first version of the software architecture for the ASV navigation system was proposed in the previous report. In the current reporting period, several aspects of this architecture has been partially instantiated and tested on a simulated vehicle with double Ackerman kinematics. Validation on the extended USV simulation architecture will be carried out in the forthcoming reporting period.

A key component of the UAV navigation system is the USV vision-based detector. Without it, the UAV will not be able to properly dock on the USV. The detector has been devised and will be implemented in the forthcoming reporting period. We expect to have results soon enough to submit this work to the next IROS conference.

The control centre is almost finalised, requiring now a thorough field evaluation. Due to the impossibility of running field tests in the short-term, the effort put in this task during the reporting period was directed towards bug fixing and minor adjustments at the user interaction level.

The project aims at enabling environmental monitoring of rivers with a robotic team composed of an autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) and a quad-copter. The major challenges to be faced in the project are related to autonomous navigation in riverine environments and complex interactions between the two robotic platforms. There is also considerable integration effort involved.

This document reports the progress of the RIVERWATCH experiment from week 1 to week 8. In this period, tasks 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 advanced as planned in the experiment’s proposal.