Our research group is currently building an Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV) from scratch and is looking for students to help with the design and fabrication of the craft. Currently a KCS hull form has been chosen for the ASV with a 1:75.5 scale ratio to result in a 3 meter model. This vehicle will be a self propelled vehicle with an onboard computer and sensor suite that will allow the vehicle to localize itself and navigate in an environment. The vehicle will have multiple uses including investigation of reinforcement learning based control for trajectory tracking, cooperative control with other unmanned vehicles, testing of various underactuated control algorithms and investigating the effect of maneuvering in waves. Currently a group of 12 undergraduate students are involved in the project.
The video below describes some of the challenges that the students will be addressing during the course of this project.