The environmental perception ability is the premise and foundation for unmanned surface vehicles to implement missions. The development status of unmanned surface vehicles, especially the Chinese latest achievements in the field of USV research and development are introduced. The current research status of unmanned surface vehicles ontology state perception and external environment perception (active perception, passive perception, integrated perception) are summarized, and the advantages and limitations are discussed. According to the future development needs, key technologies of environmental perception technology and application orientation such as high precision hydrological information inversion, sea-air collaborative observation, ocean mesoscale phenomenon observation and marine military information gathering based on USV are proposed.

unmanned surface vehicles  /  environmental perception  /  ocean observation  /  information gathering  /  sea-air coordination