Sea Cucumbers

Project Description

Enabling maritime vessels to operate autonomously eliminates the cost of manual labor, but to appreciate this cost reduction, we need an economical way of automating these ships. One viable solution is to replace the human workers in charge of operating a ship’s valves and breakers with a robot. This way, we don’t incur the cost of replacing the ship’s infrastructure, and a human can still operate the ship’s devices when necessary. Our goal is to build this robot: a “ShipBot” that can parse a mission file containing desired states for a set of devices on the ship, navigate to each of these devices, and manipulate each device to the state specified in the file.