Competition Background

RoboBoat is a yearly international competition held in Sarasota, FL where student teams of all disciplines design and build a small Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV) to complete a variety of tasks. These vessels tackle tasks that mimic real-world issues facing the maritime industry. Some of these issues include coastal surveillance, port security, and other types of oceanographic operations. A team’s ASV is judged based on its maneuverability, propulsion system and payload selection, and on-board autonomy. Every year a set of tasks is given and each team completes them to the best of their ability. This year the competition is broken into 5 tasks: speed gate, obstacle channel, obstacle field, acoustic docking, and UAS object delivery. RoboBoat competitions unite an enhanced community of innovators, with results capable of making substantive contributions to the maritime field. This is achieved by providing a venue and mechanism, whereby practitioners of robotics and maritime autonomy come together at RoboBoat to share knowledge, innovate, and collaboratively advance the technology of ASV systems.

Team Background

This year the team has opted to design a new ASV. This decision was made after some issues were observed on Phantom II during competition. This year’s team consists of five seniors and two juniors, which have all helped develop the new platform.

Cyclone - Features

• Mechanical:

  • Single hull with two custom in-line thrusters under the main hull.

  • Main hull is fiberglass, with a plywood deck

  • Aluminum extrusion superstructure for easy attachment of modules

  • Two azimuthing BlueRobotics T200 Thrusters

• Electrical:

  • Velodyne LIDAR VLP-16 HD

  • VectorNav VN-300

  • ZED 2i Stereo Camera

  • Intel NUC

• Software:

  • Python ROS

  • Tensorflow