Piotr Przecherski

Large artificial water reservoirs are one of the most valuable assets in flood protection. However, the overall volume of a reservoir can decrease over time. This happens mainly because of sediment accumulation, and that alluvia is “eating-up” an otherwise useful volume of water. It is therefore important to know the current volume of sediments accumulated in the reservoir. This way one is able to calculate the useful volume of the reservoir storage capacity, secondly, for assessment of future reservoir operation. The process of obtaining relevant data for this is normally partially automated but nevertheless, it is arduous, extremely time-consuming, and may be dangerous. To overcome those problems we have developed an unmanned vessel, which is able to perform the work much faster and easier. The vessel is a fully unmanned, integrated, nonetheless it is still under development (working prototype 1E), but it can be still easily used in its current state, albeit with some minor limitations.

Unmanned water vehicles have been routinely used for marine purposes. This technology has emerged only recently for inland waters. It is used for two main purposes: bottom area scanning, in order to create maps of bottoms of rivers and lakes, artificial or natural. This information is needed for water engineering development and rehabilitation projects, and for flood protection planning. The other use is for the determination of flow velocities in rivers and lakes, which is needed for the determination of hydraulic properties of rivers, also necessary for flood protection. For the first purpose, an original vehicle is shortly described (UPP-1E), for the other, a Commercial-Off-The-Shelf solution is presented (RiverSurveyor of SonTek).