Nortek has released a new unmanned surface vehicle (USV) designed for the Chinese market to offer an open and low-cost platform to measure water current and direction.
Nortek China has integrated Doppler instrumentation on the vehicle to help better meet user requirements for ocean surveying.
The new USV has an IPC (Industrial Personal Computer) as the main operation platform and uses Remote Desktop, a remote control technique, to communicate with all the instruments installed.
The basic exterior dimensions of the vehicle are about 200 cm length, 70 cm width and 40 cm depth. The USV has two propellers that can produce 80 pounds of thrust force. For navigation control, it can be remotely controlled manually, or be programmed to sail automatically by itself.
“ The demand for USVs is growing in China now, and China is a great market in itself. With Nortek having launched the Signature VM system here already, we should grasp this opportunity to open the vessel-mounted current measurement market in China, ” said Leon Zhang , general manager of Nortek China.
“ This USV platform was built to help users to handle multiple tasks, and to be able to do this at a low cost. Looking ahead to the future, we will develop an automatic and ‘intelligent’, or sophisticated, system to improve the performance of the USV,” added Jack Hu , technical manager at Nortek China.