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Blueboat Autonomy


Figure 1.1: Blueboat operations on the Charles River Summer/Fall 2024

As the field of marine robotics grows, it is important to develop and document technical solutions for commercially available unmanned surface vehicle (USV) platforms. The Blue Boat from Blue Robotics is one such platform that is being widely adopted due to its substantial battery life (up to 60 hours) and an impressive payload capacity for its size (30 lbs). This, in conjunction with its comparatively affordable price makes the Blue Boat an ideal candidate as an instrument in academic research.

Beginning in Summer 2024 members of the MIT Marine Autonomy Lab in conjunction with the MIT Lincoln Laboratory have worked to integrate MOOS-IvP with the BlueOS software stack via a publicly available BlueOS extension. This work will allow any Blue Boat to easily interface with MOOS-IvP or other autonomy stacks via a NMEA String based TCP communication.

Simultaneously, work is being done to advance the hardware of the Blue Boat to improve communication range, as well as ease of payload integration. A retrofitting guide is being developed to instruct users how to modify a Blue Boat from an "out of the box" state to multi-purpose MOOS-IvP platform.

Status:Ongoing since July 2024
People:Jeremy Wenger, Raymond Turrisi, Zack Serlin, Mike Benjamin (PI)
Sponsors:MIT Lincoln Lab
 RapidHarness Wire https://rapidharnes.com
Software:MOOS-IvP, https://moos-ivp.org
 ArduRover, https://ardupilot.org
 BlueOS https://blueos.cloud
Robots:The Blueboat https://oceanai.mit.edu/pavlab/robots/blueboat

Document Maintained by: jwenger@mit.edu        
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