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Talk-08: BlueBoat: The Marine Autonomy Lab’s Augmentations for Research and Education (DemoDay 2026)
Jeremy Wenger, Ray Turrisi, Michael Benjamin
MIT Dept of Mechanical Engineering, MIT Marine Autonomy Lab
Recent commercialization of marine robotics has dramatically lowered the cost of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs), making platforms like the Blue Robotics BlueBoat viable candidates for large-scale autonomous fleets. Over the past two years, the MIT Marine Autonomy Lab has developed a holistic set of modifications to the stock BlueBoat to improve its effectiveness as a research and educational platform. These modifications span payload support, communications, localization, and software architecture — including a modular payload superstructure, mesh networking, RTK GNSS with direct heading, and a front-seat/back-seat MOOS-IvP autonomy stack. The complete system was most recently evaluated during a two-week course introducing students to MOOS-IvP and marine autonomy through friendly competition.
This presentation will describe each modification and its design rationale, and will present preliminary field results, including comms-aware autonomy experiments characterizing the relationship between inter-vehicle distance and mesh link quality. It will also discuss the planned release of open-source documentation and build guides enabling other institutions to reproduce the platform. An on-water demonstration of current research projects using these vehicles will accompany the presentation.
Categories:
- Autonomous Sailing
- USVs
- Commercial Marine Vehicles