Trans-Atlantic Robots

An anonymous reader writes "In the summer of 2008, teams from a host of countries will compete in The Microtransat Challenge with the hope of gaining the honor of having built the first autonomous sailboat to cross the Atlantic. The results of Microtransat 2007, a smaller scale preliminary race, were recently announced. The winner was the team from Austria; team RoBoat, for having completed 24 hours of autonomous sailing. I am strongly considering joining this competition before the year is out, and would appreciate any insight from the Slashdot community. The boats can be up to 4 meters in length, and therefore capable of carrying a full-sized onboard computer (operating system of your choice). Time is limited however, so I would like to avoid as many hardware issues as possible and get straight to the difficult problem of writing the AI. So how would you design a seamless interface between sensors and actuators to the high-level code?"

Comments

URBI

[bobby1234]

http://www.urbiforge.com/ "URBI is a Universal Real-time Behavior Interface and gives you a simple but powerful way to control any robot or complex system like a video game, using a convenient and easy to use scripting language that can be interfaced with several popular programming languages (C++, Java, Matlab,...) and OS (Windows, Mac OSX, Linux). URBI is based on a client/server architecture, which give a great deal of flexibility. URBI includes powerful features compared to existing scripting solutions: parallel execution of commands, event programming, command tagging, dynamic variables,... Currently, URBI is used as well by academic research labs, the industry and by hobbyists."

Well, DUH!

[Anonymous Coward]

The first thing I would do to get a leg up in the competition would be to post the question to a technology website that garners millions of hits a day - a website that, more than likely, most of the robot boat-building teams are familiar with. That way, no one but me would have access to collective thoughts of hundreds of brainstormers.

approach

[belmolis]

I couldn't help noticing that the rules forbid interference with other boats' electronic equipment and colliding with other boats, but say nothing about the use of, say, cannon. :)

Re:approach

[Rakishi]

Well they may consider the cannot round to be part of the boat thus it hitting another boat being a "collision." On the bright side even if you do get disqualified for such an act the DARPA grant you'll get soon afterwards will probably be worth more than the competition prize.

What we use

[jfim]

Our team(SONIA) is working on autonomous underwater vehicles and we are using Linux with Java for the AI part. For communication with actuators, we use the CAN bus, which is fairly common in the industrial automation and automotive fields.

There are CAN bus adapters that plug into serial or USB ports and there is Linux support for these. We're using one from Vector.

As for hardware, we use the Kontron JREX SBC with JFlex I/O boards to add the I/O ports we need(firewire and serial, mostly). Of course, if you're not cramped for space, you might go with something a bit larger.

I hope this helps, feel free to ask more questions.

Re:An OS for your system?

[greenguy]

Oh, sure, Linux can handle a USB port. But can it handle a USB starboard?

If it requires a driver and a Linux driver is available

Didn't you RTFS? It has to be autonomous. That means no driver.