Abstract
Most autonomous sailboats don’t have dedicated obstacle avoidance systems. For autonomous research data collection in an environment as busy as Lake Constance, we feel that obstacle avoidance is essential to protect the swarm of sailboat robots as well as others on the water. This talk presents an approach to detecting and avoiding boats, people, piers, and, yes, ducks in every condition the vessels might encounter during a week-long research mission. The system fuses thermal imaging, RGB video, and mmWave radar into a single integrated module, tested in a variety of weather conditions both day and night, that can flag sail headings that could lead to a collision.
About the speaker
Margaret Lee is earning a BASc in Engineering Physics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She got her start in robotics building autonomous sailboats at her university and has been pursuing robotics projects ever since. She is currently hosted at the University of Konstanz through the DAAD RISE program under her supervisor, Pranav Kedia.