Developing the concept of multifunctional smart buoys

In recent years, significant scientific interest has been expressed towards the concept of a smart buoy system, from applications such as river level monitoring and early flood warning systems [1] and water quality monitoring [2] [3], to coral reef monitoring [4]. In addition to the scientific community, great interest in the development of smart buoys has been shown by both startups and large international companies such as Intel [5]. Some examples of smart buoy applications developed as startup products include sonar-equipped buoys for shark detection on the beaches of Perth, Australia [6], buoys for remote monitoring of water quality, salinity, temperature, and shellfish growth in aquaculture applications [7] [8], and the automation of sensor buoy monitoring and tracking as well as remote data collection in the navigable canals of the Netherlands [9].