Maritime RobotX Challenge

What is RobotX?

The Maritime RobotX Challenge is a bi-yearly robotics competition hosted by RoboNation. Using a particular vessel called the WAM-V, teams build a robotic system that is capable of solving up to seven complex autonomous or manual naval tasks. The competition is multinational, with teams in past competitions coming from the USA, Australia, Singapore, Japan, and South Korea.

Who is team Kanaloa?

During summer of ‘16, Team Kanaloa was formed at the University of Hawaii at Manoa under the direction of Dr. Zachary Trimble. The goal of Team Kanaloa was to design, build, and program an unmanned water surface vessel in order to complete naval tasks within the semi-annual Maritime RobotX Challenge. The project required a wide variety of skills to develop the various subsystems that made up our autonomous vessel.

My contributions

My role within this project was as a computing sub-team member. I used Robot Operating System (ROS) to integrate LiDAR and GPS data to populate a 2D occupancy grid, used for object detection, pathplanning, and localization. I also implemented an A* pathplanning algorithm to plot a path from current location to a given goal coordinate within our occupancy grid. In addition, I wrote the top-level launch files for ROS to initialize various ROS nodes and scripts.

This project proved to be equally difficult and rewarding. I got my first taste of Linux through this project as the software framework we used (ROS) to program and connect various hardware components and data nodes worked best on Ubuntu 16.04 at the time. The project was also my first experience with a large, integrated project. Team Kanaloa comprised of over 15 people working simultaneously on various subsystems of our vessel, and I gained valuable experience on how communcation between teams needs to change with scale.