Application and Potential Design of an Amphibious Drone Hub: Water Lily and Bioinspiration Concepts

The ability to remotely operate a collection of aquatic drones for extended periods of time will provide significant improvements to autonomous data collection in marine environments. The implementation of a floating drone hub will allow aquatic and amphibious systems to more closely monitor aquatic species and complete various other long-term missions. In addition, this hub will allow these extended duration missions to operate in remote areas where regular human intervention may be challenging or costly. As an additional design aspect, these hubs could be used as floating solar arrays in remote areas to provide power to small communities near a coast. This paper proposes a novel design for such a floating hub concept and explores bioinspired aspects of its design.