Autonomous Catamaran

The Lake Wivenhoe Integrated Mobile Sensor Network Project was a collaboration between CSIRO and Seqwater. As Seqwater is the single treated and bulk water provider for South East Queensland. To better understand and manage the state drinking water Seqwater in partnership with CSIRO developed an autonomous catamaran which travels between floating nodes gathering data.

To collect data on water temperature, stock movements on land and measure weather patterns, a 120 nodes are deployed in the Wivenhoe catchment. Of the 120 nodes, 45 are floating, measuring water temperature, the other 70 are deployed across the catchment area on land. The sensor nodes operate in a meshed network, which means they record environmental variables and cooperate with each other to set up an ad hoc network to wirelessly transfer data.

This real time data collection allows us to monitor events as they happen. If the network detect an event the catamaran can autonomously sample more detail. The catamaran is manually controlled through a PDA, web interface or mobile phone.