In-field experiments with six autonomous kayaks. The rendering is from GPS log data recovered from the six vehicles.

In this experiment we deployed and recovered six fully autonomous surface vehicles with a single user and laptop computer. The vehicles were deployed to cover a set of contiguous hexagonal regions.

The purpose of this experiment was (a) to experiment with the difficulties of controlling large numbers of vehicles with a single user, (b) experiment with dynamic behavior reconfiguration from a remote platform. In this experiment all vehicles returned within yards of the deployment platform on the Charles River. Note: one of the six vehicles was experiencing a "tired" propulsor and never achieved its mission speed - it can be noted in the video as the only vehicle that did not make a full hexagonal pass on its deployment area. Iit is also the vehicle in red.