Paper Title
A Smart Data Acquisition System For Autonomous Platforms

Abstract
Nowadays lot of efforts are being made in understanding of the parameters that directly or indirectly influence global warming and pollution of rivers and small water bodies[1]. It requires manual collection of water samples and analysing them at Laboratory or in-situ measurements using Robots like the Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs), Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), gliders etc. In this paper we talk about the development of a Science Node for using with these robots capable of measuring these scientific parameters and sending the measured parameters to the main computer of these platforms. The scientific sensors suite includes Chlorophyll, Turbidity, Dissolved Oxygen, Conductivity, Temperature sensors for water quality measurements. Additional capability for interfacing a standalone web-camera for surveillance is incorporated. A data acquisition system is designed to meet the varying sampling rate requirements these scientific sensors from 1Hz to 15 Hz. A detailed description of the hardware architecture and the software algorithms used for the Science Node are described in the text below. The Node has been interfaced and tested with an on-going ASV project at CSIR-National Institute of Oceanography, Goa. The Hardware is based on a off the shelf low cost Beaglebone development platform. The development board suffices the need for interfacing three serial based sensors, a web camera interfaced to the USB port, an Ethernet port to stream the video and memory for logging the scientific sensors data. The software is written using C language and is compatible with Linux operating System. The code is flexible enough to allow the user to connect scientific sensors to any serial port, change the sampling rates by modifying a configuration file and capture images which are streamed on the web-server. Keywords- ASV, AUV, Glider, Web-Camera, Surveillance, Data Acquisition, Stream