  Autonomous coverage has tremendous importance for environmental surveying and
exploration tasks performed on rivers both in terms of efficiency and data
collection quality. Most surveys of rivers are performed manually using quite
similar approaches. Using these practices to automate these processes improves
the quality of survey operations. In addition to human expertise on the type of
patterns,the coverage of a river can be optimized using the river meanders to
determine the direction of coverage. In this work we use the implicit
information on the speed of the water current, inferred from the curves of the
river, to reduce the cost of cover-age. We use autonomous surface vehicles
(ASVs) to deploy the proposed methods and demonstrate the efficiency of our
method. In addition we compare the proposed method with previous coverage
techniques developed in our lab. When taking into account meanders the coverage
time has been decreased in average by more than 20%. The deployments of the
ASVs were performed on the Congaree River, SC,USA, and resulted in more than
27km of total coverage trajectories.
