Author: Ren Jia

Purpose of display:

This work aims to explore the application of autonomous control technology in marine survey equipment. By designing and building a spherical buoy with station-keeping capability, it seeks to enhance the efficiency and stability of environmental monitoring within offshore areas. With the global emphasis on marine environmental protection and scientific research, traditional deployable buoys face issues such as significant drift and difficulty in positioning, while moored buoys are costly to maintain manually. This project integrates embedded sensor control and navigation algorithms to enable the buoy to automatically adjust its heading and remain stably within a designated sea area without human intervention. It offers strong flexibility, ease of deployment and recoverability. The buoy can be widely applied to scenarios such as offshore scientific observation, water quality sampling and typhoon inversion.

Display content:

This work is a spherical, autonomously controlled buoy propelled by an internal carriage. The carriage is equipped with GPS positioning, an attitude sensor (MPU6050), a 4G communication module, and a flywheel, enabling the buoy to perform self-navigation. At sea, the buoy uses the GPS module to identify its current position, which can be displayed on a simulation platform. Based on a preset target direction, the buoy uses the internal carriage and flywheel system to adjust its heading and move towards the target point, thereby enabling continuous station-keeping within a specified sea area. Attitude and environmental data can be transmitted back via the 4G module for environmental monitoring and wave inversion in designated waters.

Dimensions: Spherical structure; approx. 25 cm in outer diameter

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