Methods for Development of a Digital Twin of the Water Area for Navigation of Unmanned Vessels

The article discusses a set of methods with which it is possible to form a digital twin of the water area for autonomous navigation of a river vessel to solve problems of modelling movement in the water area of an autonomous vessel under various environmental parameters (flow velocity, wind speed, etc.), including dynamically changing ones within the process of vessel’s movement, to test algorithms for operation of an autonomous vessel under the conditions of emerging threats and emergency incidents. The proposed methods include aerial photography from unmanned aerial systems, airborne laser scanning and coordination of the results of their processing using geodetic equipment operating using global navigation satellite systems and serving to link all received spatial data into a single coordinate system to form high-precision digital twin components of water area, including the water’s edge and part of surface elements. To form the bottom part of a digital twin of the water area, a possibility was considered to use bathymetric survey data collected with a multibeam echosounder, as well as aerial photography data received from an unmanned aerial vehicle equipped with a high-precision geodetic receiver and an on-board inertial system for laying out bathymetric survey routes.