During this seminar, A. Anderson presented it works about Strategies development for water quality assessment with Unmanned Surface Vehicles.

The CT2MC company has designed a range of Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) dedicated to answer the need of data monitoring of freshwater resources and guaranteeing the realization of sampling missions and inspections without contamination of the environment. This emerging technology has a significant market potential that may lead to a substantial cost savings in monitoring of difficult-to-access systems. The USVs are equipped with specific sensors that replaces the usual instrumentation
(deployed in few locations) to assess the quality of water and it facilitates some environmental missions unable to perform with the fixed instrumentation. For instance, for the analysis of degradation of contaminants it is require a vast and reliable data of physicochemical parameters from large and remote surfaces of water. Regarding this, a set of real experiments were performed on a wider area of the Heron lake in Villeneuve d’Ascq to generate a limnological map and to describe the dilution and decontamination of the region. According to the experiments, it is necessary to development control strategies for the specific missions (in order to obtain regular data of the area), also the assessment of specific interpolation methods to approximate missing data. In this summary a briefly description of the obtained results and the perspective for USVs targetting water quality assessment is addressed.