Design and implementation of a new jet-boat based unmanned surface vehicle

Autonomous unmanned surface vehicle (USV) has great potentials in many applications such as water quality monitoring, coastal defence and anti-terrorist. However, complicated surroundings and high uncertainties make its full autonomy difficult to realize. In this paper, we design and implement a new USV system rebuilt from a jet boat to provide convenience for future´s autonomous control experiments. The new designed USV system is composed of three parts: main body, on board computer control system and ground control system. Both its hardware structure and its software system are introduced detailedly in this paper, and some experimental results on data exchange are also presented to verify the validity of the whole USV system.