SailBot
In Progress
The International Robotic Sailing Regatta (IRSR), also known as SailBot, was founded in 2006 to promote and document developments in autonomous sailing. Since then many teams have competed, bringing forth numerous designs, technologies and approaches. WPI began its participation a decade after the event's founding in 2016, handling development as a cyclical MQP offering. Since this founding WPI has brought home multiple 1st place titles. This year's team hopes to bring home another, focusing efforts on a redesign of the keel, rudder, trim tab, vision architecture, and mobile control application.
My role in this project primarily focused on developing a new vision approach. This restructure is centered around more effective support for a previously failed competition event "Search" as other IRSR events requiring buoy localization. To achieve improved performance this restructure pivotted from the previous blob detection based approach with OpenCV to a neural network based approach with a custom YOLO (You Only Look Once) model. In particular a v11n model was trained on broad dataset containing images of various styles and colors on buoys in various situations. This allows design agnostic buoy recognition, a functionality the previous architecture lacked, requiring manual recalibration. The smallest architecture size, nano, was selected such that the model can be effectively run in entirely in memory on our SailBot's Jetson Orin Nano brain. This project is still a WIP hence a lack of links, but initial data is very promising on various improvement vectors.