AUVSI's Unmanned Systems 2016

The Use of Open Source Software in an Advanced Autonomous Surface Vehicle Competition. (Room Innovation Hub-- Booth 2727)

04 May 16
10:00 AM - 5:30 PM

Tracks: Academic, Maritime, Research and Development

Speaker(s): Abigail Butka, Student, Daytona Beach Homeschoolers

The Daytona Beach Homeschoolers consists of the tenth grade students Abigail Butka and Nick Serle. This team was the youngest and smallest team entered in the Roboboat 2015 competition. The team’s boat completed many tasks and finished in fourth 4th place overall, beating several collegiate teams. The small team was very budget constrained and used open source hardware and software to address the technical requirements. This paper describes how the S.S. Minnow team was able to compete in the RoboBoat competition with a $600 budget. Topics in this paper include: the overall strategy to accomplish the competition tasks, vision processing techniques, and the hardware chosen for the S.S. Minnow. The paper concludes with summarizing the entry’s performance in the competition and analyzing the successes and proposing fixes to the problems that were identified.