UWF Marine Robotics

Had a great day at Bear Lake testing our boat platform.

We are fully furnished on the boat now. All that's left is ironing out the troublesome ROS packages.

The Marine Robotics team has officially disassembled the Tank in preparation to move to the completed Boat platform. Our next step is mounting all the components and sensors onto the Boat!

Our team has designed a boat platform with a removable boathouse to house the components and systems that will be used to perform autonomously to complete challenges in the 2022 RoboBoat competition. The boathouse can also be mounted on our tank for land-based testing of the boat's equipment.

2020 RoboBoat: Final Standings - RoboBoat

UWF Marine Robotics Team wins $1500 for website and evidence of testing.

2020 RoboBoat: Final Standings - RoboBoat The 13th RoboBoat Competition was held online, due to the in-person event being cancelled as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. With 8 teams representing México and the United States and territories.

UWF RoboBoat 2020

One of the elements of the RoboBoat competition is a team video. Watch to learn more about our members and the progress we have made over the last two years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJyvc6QXgRg

UWF RoboBoat 2020 UWF Marine Robotics Team Submission for the 2020 RoboBoat competition

Here's a screenshot from the first time we tested our LiDAR inside the lab. Can you spy someone who's excited to have it working?

LiDAR detects physical objects, and will tell the boat where obstacles are located. The LiDAR will be used in tandem with cameras, which will fill in information that the LiDAR can't know (such as color) to determine what an object is.

Last Spring (2019) the UWF Marine Robotics Team had the opportunity to attend Capitol Day in Tallahassee. Several UWF students were invited to show off works in progress and meet with Florida representatives, as well as Governor DeSantis. At that time, all we had was our hand-me-down boat and a plan. We've come a long way in the past year!

As you may imagine, testing a robot that can only move in the water poses some extra challenges for the team. In order to be able to test more often, the team put together a tank that can be tested any time, anywhere. Although maneuvering the tank is not exactly the same as the boat, it gives us the opportunity to see our GPS, LiDAR, and other components in action whenever we want (as long as our batteries are charged!)

Our current boat was inherited from one of the previous teams. It may not be much to look at, but when we took it to the pool for a test drive, it handled much better than we expected! The Roboboat competition allows for teams to purchase pre-made boats, but extra points are awarded for building your own.