RobotX

The Maritime RobotX Challenge is a bi-annual international research competition in the field of marine autonomy. It is similar to the format of the RoboBoat competition, but much larger in scale. Teams were given a 16ft Wave Adaptive Modular Vessel to outfit with propulsion, sensors, etc. and would compete in a series of challenges relating to surface vehicle autonomy.

Joining forces with Florida Atlantic University, the VU/FAU WORX team was one of three teams representing the US in the 2014 inaugural competition hosted in Singapore. We were fortunate to win the Best Science Award, the Best Presentation Award, the Best Journal Paper Award, and 1st place in Static Judging.

Located on the coast, FAU had access to fantastic testing facilities and environments. Thus we divided the labor such that FAU would house the vehicle and take charge over low-level system hardware development (e.g. power, propulsion, vehicle state sensing), while the VU side would develop the vision system, inter-system communications, and high-level autonomy algorithms.

Leveraging my experience with RoboBoat, my role on the RobotX team was in programming task-level autonomy. I was directly responsible for the algorithms governing the autonomous docking and obstacle navigation tasks.

Advisors: Dr. C. Nataraj, Dr. Garrett Clayton

Competition summary poster

Video of the boat in action in Singapore