A competition held in Ningbo, China. It had more than 17 teams in the present edition and had the participation of teams from multiple countries, especially from the host, China. The organizing committee invites teams from any organization, including individuals, schools, colleges, universities and companies, to participate in the contest. Each team competes with a boat.
Fleet race: This challenge is based on the classic triangular sailing regatta course. Boats will start from the start line at 30-second intervals, cross the start line, reach three markers and start from the finish line.
Maintenance and station keeping: The station maintenance challenge is also called "virtual moorings", originating in real applications where your boat needs to moor or sail at a fixed location. This challenge, consisting of parts A and B, tests the ship's ability to accurately control on a small scale. You need to complete part A before going to the other area to complete part B.
Scanning Collaborative Areas: In recent years, there have been increasing attempts to use collaborative seagoing vessels. A typical collaborative task is to efficiently scan a large area. The collaborative area scanning challenge asks teams to consider the scanning skills and objectives of other teams to optimize their own points. The scanning task is performed in a large area that is subdivided into grids.
Hide and seek: This challenge involves interaction and networking. Detecting and pursuing a particular objective is a complex and high-level task for automotive vessels.
The system was grouped in three main subsystems that will be described in a more detailed fashion in the next sections: Perception, Motion planning and Control. For cognition tasks, two computers will be employed in the corresponding module. The perception and navigation module are the most demanding process of our system in terms of computational resources. A Raspberry Pi 3 B+ is considered for these data acquisition and data fusion tasks. The low-level control, used for the actuation mechanisms, will be based on a Arduino Uno board.
We are also grateful to the organizing committee for granting us the ready to sail kit, with which we were able to compete and now, we can continue working on new designs.
The oceans will soon be filled with driverless ships. Unmanned ship technology can drastically reduce the costs of ocean research, border security and surveillance in turbulent or remote waters.
Being able to research this type of platform not only helps with marine solutions, developing autonomous systems involves blocks of software and hardware that can be used in multiple types of vehicles: state estimation system, trajectory planner or even control algorithms.
Getting engaged in project development that involves seeing something move and "understand" its environment is the best way to learn and gain experience through our own experiences.