for doing hydrographic work? I saw one at the Florida FSMS conference last year. Kinda pricey, but for small, tight spaces I thought it would be a good tool.
Few years back met some USGS guys doing volume flow measurements on a river near where I was working and they were using a remote control boat to obtain bathymetry. A quick google search turned this up
Just because I'm paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get me.
Nice link. That one looks like a modified kick board.
Remote controlled boats for hydro is a cool idea. I help my boss rig up a Sea Doo once with GPS and a sounding device. That worked out well as he was doing cross sections on a channel and needed to go in and out of shallow water, and those boats don't need much depth to get around. Of course, I got to watch from shore as the bossman cruised around on the Sea Doo for hours ... 🙁
Had a buddy that had built a radio controlled boat when we were putting the Clark County in commission at Camden N.J.. Were living in a Barracks Barge at the Philadelphia Naval Base. On launch day we went to a large park in Philadelphia that had a lake and rental row boats were available. By the time we finally caught that darn boat we could have mapped the whole bottom of that lake from a row boat. Was kind of fun though, trying to catch the thing or to head it off. The next week the radio controls worked fine after major debugging.
jud
http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/ardupilot-goes-into-the-water-224
A pretty neat blog from a German guy working out the bugs of measuring lake depths. Amazing how much time he spends working on this.