MOOS-DAWG'24 Demo Day:
MIT Marine Autonomy Lab at the MIT Sailing Pavilion
8:00am-11:30am August 8th 2024 (second day of the workshop).
Lunch at 1130am (For workshop registrants).

The morning of Day 2 of the workshop we invite workshop attendees to the MIT Sailing Pavilion Marine Autonomy Lab, about a 5 mins from the Stata Center where the main workshop talks are held. The Demo Day is presented in the "workshop spirit", where work ranging from in-progress to more advanced is encouraged. Expect the unexpected.


Participants 2022 Demo Day (2024 Schedule will begin to be posted in early April 2024)


www.thayermahan.com
Talk 12: The USV Babou
ThayerMahon, USV Babou is a testing and development platform for larger ThayerMahan autonomous systems. Built on a jet-ski hull, Babou allows ThayerMahan to test software and hardware at high speed with a minimum of logistics. The vehicle is easy to transport, quick to launch and allows for rapid testing of autonomy behaviors when a larger vessel would be cumbersome. This allows the development team at ThayerMahan to embark on many smaller sea-trials rather than one large and expensive one; leveraging incremental improvements and updated behaviors as they become available. Ample mast and antenna space is available which allows new payloads and sensors to be integrated with a minimum of downtime. USV Babou runs a Pixhawk front-seat and Goby/MOOS-IvP back-seat; allowing for advanced autonomy behaviors and collaboration with other unmanned systems in the waterspace. While USB Babou is only a test article and ThayerMahan is building larger and longer-duration vehicles, this remains a valuable test article.

https://www.jaia.tech
www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOmP9zADWl8
Talk 02: The JaiaBot UUV
Jaia Robotics, JaiaBot. Jaia Robotics is a Rhode Island based business established in December 2020. The company is focused on collecting aquatic data at scale and a very low cost using microsized autonomous marine vehicles called JaiaBots, that can be deployed in multi vehicle pods. Working in pods of 1-20 to collect data over wide areas very inexpensively. They are dual use products that provide environmental monitoring, oceanographic, water quality and acoustic monitoring solutions. We offer the JaiaBot platform with training and support packages and a monthly subscription model. Data collection services are available to customers who do not want to own or operate hardware.


oceanai.mit.edu/pavlab/robots/sailboat
Talk 06: Autonomous Sailboat
Marine Robotics, LLC: We will present on the basic capability of mass producible autonomously sailing robotic boats that employ MOOS-IvP. We have been developing this technology to service the tide-water bays and rivers in regions like the mid-Atlantic USA. Typical of this tidewater environment is shallow, (typically 1 to 3-foot depth) saline water. It is typically polluted, exhausted and highly trafficked. Low cost (autonomous) marine observation greatly aids the communities and industry by providing real-time measurements of pH, depth, wind, oxygen, nitrogen, current and temperature.


https://arg-nctu.github.io/robotx-2022
Talk 04: Duckiepond 2.0
NCTU DuckieBoat: Duckiepond 2.0 extends the education and research environment Duckiepond, including an accessible “Duckieboat” platform and simulation environments (Gazebo and Unity). Duckieboat (DBT22) is built upon commercially available inflatable boats and outboard motors. The modularity designs of sensor tower, autonomy box, and communication module (DuckieAnchor) can be deployed on heterogeneous autonomous surface vehicles, providing longer communication ranges and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) developments.



https://seagrant.mit.edu
http://www.brunswick.com
The AUV Lab at MIT Sea Grant and the Brunswick Corporation have collaborated to integrate MOOS-IvP on the Boston Whaler R/V Philos. This integration allows Philos to utilize built-in MOOS apps and IvP behaviors like obstacle avoidance, COLREGS, and survey patterns. A selection of these behaviors will be demonstrated. Multi-vehicle behaviors will also be demonstrated with the AUV Lab vehicle Remote Explorer (REx) 4. Philos is on loan to the AUV Lab from Brunswick for research and support purposes. 




oceanai.mit.edu/robots/morpheus
Talk 13: Morpheus AUV
Morpheus: By adopting bio-inspired morphing dorsal and ventral fins, this project, sponsored by Lockheed Martin, demonstrates how to achieve good directional stability, exceptional maneuverability, and minimal adverse response to turbulent flow, properties that are highly desirable for rigid hull AUVs, but are presently difficult to achieve because they impose contradictory requirements. This project develops the theory and design for switching between operating with sufficient stability that ensures a steady course in the presence of disturbances, with low corrective control action; reverting to high maneuverability to execute very rapid course and depth changes, improving turning rate by 25% up to 50%; and ensuring at all times that angular responses to external turbulence is minimized.


Composable Autonomies
Composed Autonomies: SeeByte and MIT have explored the feasibility of composing multiple autonomy architectures that can cohabit on a single platform and across multiple vehicles to have a best of breed system of systems. During the demo we will conduct a mission demonstrating: a) SeeByte Neptune Autonomy and MIT MOOS-IvP collaboration for decision making on single platforms; b) SeeByte Neptune Autonomy and MIT MOOS-IvP collaboration across multiple vehicles, effectively creating a distributed system composed of two vehicles and four collaborating autonomies. Funded by ONR.


twitter.com/SupunRandeni/status
www.youtube.com/7l5uMhcTgv4
SilverTail UUV The underwater sensing capability can be significantly advanced by using multiple UUVs that work together in a collaborative autonomy paradigm, each serving as a node in a large sensory array. With this goal in mind, the Silvertail AUV was developed as a multi-purpose, reliable and yet extremely low-cost platform. This novel AUV class is powerful in software, and also very easy to manufacture.


http://www.clearpathrobotics.com/heron
Talk 20: The Swarm Autonomy Toolbox
Heron USVs and Swarm Autonomy Toolbox: The Clearpath Robotics Heron USVs are used at MIT as primary teaching equipment, as well as several research projects including COLREGS autonomy and collaborative adaptive sampling. Recently MIT has increased the fleet of Herons to nine vehicles, in collaboration with MIT Lincoln Laboratory. These platforms are use for testing new algorithms and behaviors in the Swarm Autonomy Toolbox. During Demo Day we will conduct a mission demonstrating (a) collaborative decentralized decision-making, (b) linear convoying, and (c) collaborative defensive protection. The operating pipeline for developing, maintaining and deploying mission software across multiple vehicles will also be discussed.



Talk 20: The Swarm Autonomy Toolbox
MTASC Multi Agent Tactical Autonomy Simulation Cluster: MTASC is a collection of physically co-located computers residing on a single local area network for simulating large sets of autonomous agents or vehicles. These systems are very close to operation of actual marine robots in a distributed multi-vehicle mission. Each node in the MTASC cluster can be directly dropped into any one of the MIT small autonomous surface craft as its autonomy computer. Operation in simulation of the MTASC cluster on a local network requires nearly all the same networking, version control, monitoring, and command-and-control tools required for operating physically deployed robots on the water.



oceanai.mit.edu/pavlab/robots/c-ray
TENTATIVE
Talk 07: Pliant Energy
Pliant Energy, C-Ray platform is a unique autonomous amphibious vehicle, developed by Pliant Energy Systems in Brooklyn NY, with funding from the Office of Naval Research . It can use several modes of locomotion found in the animal kingdom using just one pair of fins. These fins are best described as four-dimensional objects with a hyperbolic geometry that allows the robot to swim like a ray, crawl like a millipede, jet like a squid, and slide like a snake. C-Ray has unprecedented freedom to travel through a range of environments in a single mission. As an underwater vehicle, the robot's ability to instantly reverse direction and do quick turns make it ideal for tasks such as coral reef inspection or dragon fish hunting where a craft must rapidly maneuver to look around and between objects.