.: RoboBoat Competition

From the RoboBoat Website:

The Autonomous Surface Vehicle Competition (ASVC) is a student competition based around unmanned boats operating under rules of the waterway. This includes littoral area navigation, channel following and autonomous docking. This is typically done with computer vision, multi-sensor fusion techniques, proactive and reactive path planning, and machine learning approaches using embedded systems within the vehicle. Open to high school and college teams.

This year's vehicle has been designed specifically for improved performance in the water. We have moved from a two-hull platform to a tri-hull platform. This has given us much better stability in the water. Last year's platform had the problem of pitching back and forth, but the new platform has reduced that effect.

Side by Side View The vehicle on the right is our new platform for this year. It is called the Smart ACE. Sitting up on the front of the boat is our sub-vehicle.	SubVehicle The subvehicle is constructed using Vex kits and is controlled using an Android platform. The android device is not shown in this picture, but it normally sits on the platform shown.
SubVehicle Garage The housing for the sub-vehicle is made out of wood and has a door that is servo actuated.	Vision Systems For the vision processing we use a GoPro camera that is mounted on a mast that is about a quarter of the boat's length from the front of the boat.
Cheater's Hand For the Cheater's hand challenge we have a water cannon mounted on the left hull of the boat. This position may change later as we want to try and get the water cannon as close to the line of sight of the camera as possible so as to minimize the error and increase the accuracy of the water cannon.	Jackpot Station For the Jackpot station, we have a button bumper that's attached to the left hull of the boat. It is used to sideswipe the e-stop button once we find it.
Hot Suite For the hot suite identification, we plan on using a thermopile sensor to read in the temperature. Work is still being done on getting the sensor attached and working.	The Brain For onboard processing we are using a Dell Inspiron N5110 and all our software is written in LabVIEW. LabVIEW's Vision Assistant software was very useful in vision processing. We heavily relied upon the Vision Assistant for all of our vision processing needs.
Testing Here is a picture of our boat during autonomous test runs in the testing pond.