• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.249-254
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• 2015

Buoys are widely used in marine areas because they can mark positions and simultaneously acquire and exchange underwater, surface, and airborne information. Recently, the need for controlling and optimizing a buoy's position and attitude has been raised to achieve successful communication in a heterogeneous collaborative network composed of an underwater robot, a surface robot, and an airborne robot. A buoy in the form of a marine robot would be ideal to address this issue, as it can serve as a moving node of the communication network. Therefore, a buoy-based autonomous surface robot-kit with the abilities of sonar-based avoidance, dynamic position control, and static attitude control was developed and is discussed in this paper. The test and evaluation results of this kit show the possibility of real-world applications and the need for additional studies.