Badger BOAT

BadgerBoat is a research project where the client, Lennon Rogers, posed a challenge without formal design specifications. Lennon Rogers wants to create an autonomous boat system that can navigate the local lakes and rivers to collect useful data. The specific way that the boat should help the community was up to the team. Our proposed project was to create an autonomous, solar powered boat that detects and records data on dangerous blue-green algae. The boat will reduce man hours required to collect information, and provide continuous streams of data, hopefully leading to cleaner, safer lakes and rivers. This year long challenge was broken down into five subsections of design specifications: boat construction, unmanned navigation, collect useful data, multi-day journey, and total autonomy. The project consisted of two teams that work in parallel. Team 2 was tasked with building the boat and making it autonomous, while team 1 focused on power supply and regeneration. In the fall semester, the goal of BadgerBoat team two was to have the boat built and achieve unmanned GPS navigation.

For this project I was involved in a bit of everything and I worked on firmware, software, design of boat components, LiDAR and GPS navigation. For Firmware, we used a combination of ROS and MOOS, and software we developed using a MOOS base. I also helped the team create a design for the whole boat and several smaller components using SolidWorks. I also used a combination of ROS and MOOS to interface GPS and LiDAR sensors with the robot.