Sea-U-Foil: A Hydrofoil Marine Vehicle with Multi-Modal Locomotion

Zuoquan Zhao, Yu Zhai, Chuanxiang Gao, Wendi Ding, Ruixin Yan, Songqun Gao, Bingxin Han, Xuchen Liu, Zixuan Guo, Ben M. Chen

Abstract: Autonomous Marine Vehicles (AMVs) have been widely used in many critical tasks such as surveillance, patrolling, marine environment monitoring, and hydrographic surveying. However, most typical AMVs cannot meet the diverse demands of different marine tasks. In this article, we design a new type of remote-controlled hydrofoil marine vehicle, named Sea-U-Foil, which is suitable for different marine scenarios. Sea-U-Foil features three distinct locomotion modes, displacement mode, foilborne mode, and submarine mode, which enable the platform flexible mobility, high-speed and high-load capacities, and superior concealment. Specifically, the submarine mode makes Sea-U-Foil unique among previous studies. In addition, the performance of Sea-U-Foil in foilborne mode outperforms those of most current unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) in terms of speed and payload. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to introduce a new type of AMV that can work in displacement mode, foilborne mode, and submarine mode. We elaborate on the design principles and methodologies of Sea-U-Foil first, then validate the effectiveness of its tri-modal locomotion through extensive experiments.