“Waterproofing is a very challenging task, especially in seawater,” Chen said. “We are still working on the navigation and localisation under water because we don’t have GPS under water.
“Once it is under water, communication will be very limited.”
The hybrid drone is named the TJ-FlyingFish after CHUK’s partner institute – Tongji University’s Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous Systems.
Liu Xuchen, a member of the Unmanned Systems Research Group and a PhD Student supervised by Chen at CUHK, said the team aspired to design a drone that could support the marine inspection and engineering of offshore infrastructure, such as wind power turbines and structures like the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge.
A total of 20 workers were killed and more than 600 injured in the building of the 55km (34-mile) mega bridge.
“We want to transform [this] into an autonomous process. So, we developed our aerial-aquatic unmanned system,” Liu said.
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