The paper presents achievements at the Underwater Team at the Faculty or Maritime Technology of the Szczecin Technical University in the field at designing the equipment destined tor the underwater monitoring. The multipurpose remotely operated vehicle system is described. Technical specification, some laboratory tank test results, research techniques, operational range. experience and development trends have been discussed.
One of the major tasks is the evaluation of the water depth and underwater objects using unmanned submersible vehicles equipped with research and recording apparatus including cameras etc. The above mentioned tasks performed continually are called underwater monitoring and could be directly run without human attendance. The system which uses a remote control unmanned vehicle as instrument carrier is presented in this paper. It is referred to as KROVS Multipurpose ROV System and its prototype is being currently tested at the Faculty of Maritime Technology, Technical University of Szczecin, Poland. The system is a result of the experience in design and construction of underwater vehicles and monitoring projects completed within research done by the Faculty (see references).
MROVS comprises the following: mobile control station and KRAB-2 instrument carrier.
It is mounted on a full size car trailer and consists of: KRAB-2 control station, monitoring data recording and reproduction system, image recording and reproduction sys"tem, test and analysis mini-laboratory, communication system, auxiliaries (rescue equipment, tooling, etc.).
The carrier has five propellers, namely: two longitudinal, two transverse and one vertical. Longitudinal propellers produce ahead and astern thrust, vertical one produces upward and downward thrust whereas the transverse produce torque as well as port and stern thrust. Such location of propellers and adopted power distribution result in excellent manoeuverability and warrant four degrees of freedom.