Trans-Atlantic Robots

An anonymous reader writes "In the summer of 2008, teams from a host of countries will compete in The Microtransat Challenge with the hope of gaining the honor of having built the first autonomous sailboat to cross the Atlantic. The results of Microtransat 2007, a smaller scale preliminary race, were recently announced. The winner was the team from Austria; team RoBoat, for having completed 24 hours of autonomous sailing. I am strongly considering joining this competition before the year is out, and would appreciate any insight from the Slashdot community. The boats can be up to 4 meters in length, and therefore capable of carrying a full-sized onboard computer (operating system of your choice). Time is limited however, so I would like to avoid as many hardware issues as possible and get straight to the difficult problem of writing the AI. So how would you design a seamless interface between sensors and actuators to the high-level code?"

In one word?

[vigmeister (1112659)]

MATLAB

Cheers!

Re:

[sokoban (142301)]

Unfortunately, in order to do MATLAB you need to have already finished C.

http://koentmnd.ytmnd.com/ [ytmnd.com]

Re:

[zippthorne (748122)]

But... MATLAB is a FORTRAN wrapper.

Re:

[eggnoglatte (1047660)]

For a realtime system? Surely you are kidding.

MATLAB Real-time Workshop

[mechsoph (716782)]

You have apparently not seen Matlab's Realtime Workshop, which translates from Simulink to C for running on embedded systems. Of course, using this does mean that you have to program in Simulink. Unless your one of those (disturbingly common) engineers who just DON'T GET computers, it can make you want to stab things.

Re:

[0100010001010011 (652467)]

More Specifically: Simulink & XPC.

You can even build your own XPC boxes from old scrap PCs. The little blue XPC boxes are nice but expensive and have limited IO. Our company just did this to save some money, works great. You can bootload them so that they're always running too.

Fun stuff.

I 3 Mathworks

Re:In one word?

[by Anonymous Coward]

I've already done this in April, and it works.

http://67.15.245.144/portfolio/navcom_ai/ [67.15.245.144]

You're welcome to contact me for info, or just grab the source code and schematics since it's all open. If you do contact me however, I've changed some code in the past two months that's slightly more efficient (it's on the Parallax website in the object exchange under Math AFAIK, if you can't find it, get a hold of me)

Matteo Borri [e-mail]

URBI

[bobby1234 (860820)]

http://www.urbiforge.com/ [urbiforge.com] "URBI is a Universal Real-time Behavior Interface and gives you a simple but powerful way to control any robot or complex system like a video game, using a convenient and easy to use scripting language that can be interfaced with several popular programming languages (C++, Java, Matlab,...) and OS (Windows, Mac OSX, Linux). URBI is based on a client/server architecture, which give a great deal of flexibility. URBI includes powerful features compared to existing scripting solutions: parallel execution of commands, event programming, command tagging, dynamic variables,... Currently, URBI is used as well by academic research labs, the industry and by hobbyists."

Well, DUH!

[by Anonymous Coward]

The first thing I would do to get a leg up in the competition would be to post the question to a technology website that garners millions of hits a day - a website that, more than likely, most of the robot boat-building teams are familiar with. That way, no one but me would have access to collective thoughts of hundreds of brainstormers.

Re: Trans-Atlantic Robots

[CheekyBastard (1142171)]

You may be better off asking people within the sailing industry or a well-heeled engineering team. On /. you'll likely see this devolve into a heated debate about which flavor of *nix is better and why.

Re:

[Max Littlemore (1001285)]

you'll likely see this devolve into a heated debate about which flavor of *nix is better and why

How can there be any debate? The only answer is Boating and Sailing Distribution.

Re:

[pwolk (912457)]

The book "Robots op zee" (Robots at sea, P.W. Adriaans) deals with building a highly automated full-scale sailing boat to cross the Atlantic. Their first approach to control the boat was unsuccessful: it involved neural networks. The second approach was more successful, and involved expert systems in a cascading set-up, having a helmsman unit, a navigator unit, and a captain unit, a.o. The helmsman unit had windward and leeward defined in its internals, which proved by no means trivial. It is no project a p

approach

[belmolis (702863)]

I couldn't help noticing that the rules forbid interference with other boats' electronic equipment and colliding with other boats, but say nothing about the use of, say, cannon. :)

Re:approach

[Rakishi (759894)]

Well they may consider the cannot round to be part of the boat thus it hitting another boat being a "collision." On the bright side even if you do get disqualified for such an act the DARPA grant you'll get soon afterwards will probably be worth more than the competition prize.

Re:

[Jarjarthejedi (996957)]

Hmm...that's a tricky obstacle. How do you cheat if nothing on your boat can touch other boats, and you can't EM them...

Wait...water gun. Super High Powered Water Gun. Doesn't use any mass off your boat (ergo you can't claim collision) and doesn't 'directly' interfere with electronics (if it's not properly sealed, which would be a little silly first off, then it might interfere). Just got to get enough PSI and a good targeting system.

The best part? Infinite ammo, as long as you have power you can hit the ot

Laser beams

[Goonie (8651)]

Think about it...

No contact with other boats, hence no collision. You could aim it at the sails or the structural components of the boat, hence no interference with the "electronic components".

Now all we need is the sharks to mount the lasers on :)

Re:

[thatskinnyguy (1129515)]

True, but there is nothing in the rules that states you can't have a shark-mounted cannon.

Re:

[PinkPanther (42194)]

the rules forbid interference with other boats' electronic equipment and colliding with other boats

Wouldn't that make running the system on Windows illegal? I mean, surely the potential of suicide bombing would violate the rules too.

:-)

Re:

[Xeirxes (908329)]

Forty years later, the ocean is still overrun by four-meter long robotic attack ships, who refuse to allow any ship passage.

AI link

[SPickett (911670)]

Evolving neural network for sailing project http://annevolve.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

they should be looking here. not there.

[User 956 (568564)]

So how would you design a seamless interface between sensors and actuators to the high-level code?

Well, if the interface has to be seamless, I suggest carving it out of a solid block of wood.

let me guess...

[NotQuiteReal (608241)]

I suggest carving it out of a solid block of wood

You take a block of wood, and carve away everything that doesn't look like a boat. Right?

Re:

[fractoid (1076465)]

Alternatively, you carve a bunch of boat-shaped pieces out of the block of wood, and then assemble them. But that would be thinking laterally. ;)

"God Works in mysterious ways". "Shit Happens". Can anyone explain, obvectively, the difference?

Partitioning of responsibility. "Shit happens" is simple acceptance of the universe's imperfection. "God works in mysterious ways" lets you know that if anything good happens, God did it. Of course, if anything bad happens, you deserved it. If despite all the Church has done for you, you still don't think you deserved it, then it's a test of your faith.

Summer of 2008?

[B.D.Mills (18626)]

Damn, it's spring now; we've only got three months! Will we be ready in time?

In celebration of 10 years of Slashdot

[infonography (566403)]

I for one welcome out Transatlantic Robot Overlords.

Just do what NASA does

[Fry-kun (619632)]

if you need close-to 100% reliability, set up 3 different hardware platforms with different OSes - then run the program(s) on each and interpret the result as a system of experts (i.e. choose what the larger group suggested). If one goes down or starts spewing bad results, you'll be able to detect it. ...I think that's how it works :D

Oh, and I'd recommend miniature/low power PCs for obvious reasons. That, or laptops.

Re:

[Cecil (37810)]

That's unfortunately not a foolproof system if they're all running the same software. It is possible, perhaps even likely, that they will all fail in the same way at the same time for the same reason, leaving things completely out of control. See the Ariane 5 accident [around.com] for a practical demonstration.

Obvious solution...

[rts008 (812749)]

I would suggest just recruiting some Monkey Ninja Pirate Robots to sail it for you.
With their 133t skillz, they should remain undetected unless a container ship carrying music cd's and/or movie dvd's comes into Ahoy! range.

Oh, and look out for sharks with friggin' lasers attached to their heads-bad for sailboats.

Possible Architecture

[mechsoph (716782)]

PC (maybe mini-itx) running *nix talking via Ethernet/IP to a Netburner [netburner.com] Microcontroller talking via CAN to several PICs/AVRs with some extra circuitry (amplifiers, voltage dividers, etc) to interface with the sensors and actuators.

There are PICs and AVRs that have ethernet, but the NetBurner is damn easy to use. They also have some micros with GPIO, ADCs, and maybe PWM generation, so it might be easiest to skip the 8-bit micros altogether. I don't have any affiliation with NetBurner; I've just used their product and was sufficiently impressed that I might voluntarily choose to use it again.

Using Ethernet to control devices

[Animats (122034)]

There's something to be said for using 10baseT to talk to control devices. 10baseT has better noise immunity than RS-232 and 5V TTL encoder signals. We had trouble with big servomotor PWM noise leaking into encoder signals, and a low noise in analog signals, but the 10baseT worked perfectly, even when near the engine of our robot vehicle. Not only is it differential over twisted pair, there's checking and retransmission.

The trend is towards putting an Ethernet interface on the thing to be controlled, rather than bothering with translation to CANbus. We used Galil motor controllers, which talk TCP and UDP over Ethernet. They're OK, but you can get comparable functionality in a smaller and cheaper package now.

10baseT has a feature that's important here - the connectors have retention latches, and don't fall out. USB does not latch, which is a showstopper in an industrial or vehicle environment.

Something we found useful was encapsulating boards. Mask the connectors with masking tape, and spray with Fine-L-Kote, which seals the board against humidity and provides some mechanical protection. Inspect under ultraviolet light (the stuff is clear, but glows) to see if you missed anything.

Re:

[mechsoph (716782)]

Ethernet is not suited for realtime. Random delays in cases of collision are bad, though perhaps not as bad on switched networks. Ethernet's large message sizes increase latency, which is also bad. TCP is also not suited for realtime. You could use UDP, but then you have to guarantee delivery yourself. CAN handles collisions based on message priority guaranteeing delivery. Messages are limited to 8 bytes, so latency is low.

If you only need soft realtime, then ethernet would probably be easier. How

Re:

[Animats (122034)]

See Making Ethernet Work in Real Time [sensorsmag.com], from Sensors magazine. They show how to calculate the odds of delay exceeding a given value for a given network speed and loading. With a 10 Mb Ethernet, sending 1000 64-byte packets per second, you can be 99% sure there will not be a delay of more than 7 ms in 9 years. You can't load the network very much (5-10% is tops for a real time application). But the odds of an error are higher than the odds of a timing miss.

CANbus latency is only deterministic for the hi

What we use

[jfim (1167051)]

Our team(SONIA [etsmtl.ca]) is working on autonomous underwater vehicles and we are using Linux with Java for the AI part. For communication with actuators, we use the CAN [wikipedia.org] bus, which is fairly common in the industrial automation and automotive fields.

There are CAN bus adapters that plug into serial or USB ports and there is Linux support for these. We're using one from Vector [vector-cantech.com].

As for hardware, we use the Kontron JREX SBC [kontron.com] with JFlex I/O boards to add the I/O ports we need(firewire and serial, mostly). Of course, if you're not cramped for space, you might go with something a bit larger.

I hope this helps, feel free to ask more questions.

Use VISTA

[RSA7474 (1163263)]

Just convert all the hardware devices to be USB portable into your CPU and plug-in-play should work seamlessly, and because VISTA is so bloated it will definitely stay afloat.

OS of choice? Are swarms allowed?

[jpellino (202698)]

Cuz then I suggest taking all the remaining Windows ME boxes and as many orange crates, pillowcases, car batteries and servos as needed and go for it!

AI might not be the difficult part

[Dr. Winston O'Boogie (196360)]

I am not convinced the AI is the difficult part of this. Developing a seamless hardware solution is very difficult, assuming it need to be very robust. The salty sea air only makes this harder on the hardware, especially the electronics. However good you think you can make the AI/software part, you might want to look around for someone that can do an even better job on the hardware side. I think (good-hardware + average-software) > (average-hardware + good-software) in the domain of this contest.

Thoughts from an amateur sailor/hacker

[An dochasac (591582)]

• You're going to have to make the gear strong, waterproof, salt proof. With this short of notice you might consider a commercial autopilot/GPS with a serial interface to a computer which should be well sealed. If I were going to "roll my own" autopilot, I might consider utilizing a printer driver and mechanism but scale up the motors somehow.
• Most commercial autopilots can't tack upwind. Since the trade-winds and gulf stream are against you, you're going to have to figure out how to tack.
• You'll need a way to cut down sail. The simplest would be for the main and jib to be roller furling, but it's more difficult to have roller furling mains. Another option would be to use a tiny or heavily reefed main and have the jib/genoa be your main sail power. This sacrifices upwind performance for simplicity wind speed flexibility.
• A mechanism to measure tidal drift and correlate it with predicted high/low tides would be useful. A dumb GPS based servo will waste lots of time and wind trying to correct course for tidal drift when it's possible that 6 hours later it will waste time and wind trying to correct course in the opposite direction!
• If you wanted to be really smart, you'd try to measure and predict wind direction. For example, if you know a high pressure system is passing to your north, heading west to east, you should expect the wind to gradually clock around to the from northwest to northeast.
• "Length must not exceed 4 meters" but North Atlantic waves regularly exceed 10 meters so your boat is going to be thrown around and shaken a lot and it will need to reorient itself.
• You won't have lots of power to spare, so an efficient CPU and efficient OS will be necessary, a stripped down linux or qnx might work. For power and reliability's sake you might even consider something ancient, a 386 or 68000 on a

The real challenges

[by Anonymous Coward]

There are lots of suggestions (some workable, some not) in the discussion, but the fact is that sailing a simple rig (let's say, a cat or maybe a sloop) has a small number of controls which operate in limited ways. Robotic controls for turning winches, for handling inputs on things like windspeed are fairly well understood.

Here's where I think your problems will really lie:

a) Heavy weather sailing relies on things like reefing and steering with an eye to waves. On a small boat, this goes double. 4m is sm

Automation in Linux

[PtrToNull (742886)]

Having worked on development on robotic telescopes, both hardware and software, let me tell you that using Linux was not an easy choice. We had to narrow our search to vendors who explicitly support Linux, and even there, their support was flaky at best and we spent hours in troubleshooting the drivers before we got them to work. However, this exercise resulted in better support for Linux from the vendor, so it's a win-win situation. We opted for National Instruments [ni.com] for their excellent DAQ boards & LabView which are all supported under Linux.

For the control system, we used INDI [sf.net], it's a powerful server/client control protocol that you can use to jump start your project within minutes. While it is geared toward astronomy, it can be used for any purpose.

Make things redundant

[terminal.dk (102718)]

Things break, make them redundant.
Reember to include GPS, and a sat receiver to get weather maps. Knowing about vawes and their sizes might also prove helpful, and femember to make a big keel to keep the boat stable. And waterprof it, so it can go down but will buoy up with the sail pointing in the right direction.

silly race, really.

[zippthorne (748122)]

Buy a commercial autohelm and feed its inputs with directions based on your gps waypoints and the local weather. You'll also need some kind of auto-main-sheet and auto-jib. Large yachts already have these. Heck, most cruise ships are already ocean-crossing robots. They don't even necessarily require the pilot's input for docking maneuvers anymore.

The trick, IMO, is creating a tacking plan based on your goals for the day, and knowing when to adjust it and when to just ignore local fluctuations.

Missiles

[RAMMS+EIN (578166)]

When I read the title, I first thought about robotic _aircraft_. That seemed like a particularly bad idea...building transatlantic rockets for fun and profit! It's perfectly innocent, I assure you!

Maritime law ...

[Ihlosi (895663)]

In the summer of 2008, teams from a host of countries will compete in The Microtransat Challenge with the hope of gaining the honor of having built the first autonomous sailboat to cross the Atlantic.

The college a friend of mine went to tried doing something similar (actually, the vessel should have gone around the world instead of just crossing the Atlantic). They had to give it up due to some maritime law issue - apparently, ocean-going vessels need to be capable of picking up people in case of an emerge

"Blackboard" based system

[advocate_one (662832)]

sensors read and write to the "blackboard" through the device drivers and the high level code also reads and writes to the "blackboard"...

FlowDesigner/RobotFlow

[jmv (93421)]

I'm biased because I'm one of the authors, but you may want to have a look at FlowDesigner [sourceforge.net] and RobotFlow [sourceforge.net]. It's a visual development for plugging blocks together and we've used it to control mobile robots and interface with sensors and actuators.

Re:Don't know what you'll choose

[deniable (76198)]

Until someone gets to the Blue Waters of Death. Even better, this gives someone a chance to pirate Windows for real.

Sigh Wouldn't be the first time Windows won

[technoextreme (885694)]

Ha ha! Winner... Windows.. thats funny.

Yeah. I remember how Slashdot made a joke out of that the last time there was an article about a robot winning a competition using Windows.

Re:

[Bottlemaster (449635)]

However, the ultimate question comes down to this: does the gear you have to interface with already have some kind of driver developed for it, or do you have to write the interface to those as well?

We're talking about relays and sensors here, so device drivers really aren't much of an issue. The computer won't be talking to controllers of these devices; it will be the device controller.

It's very much like the microcontroller inside your keyboard interfacing with the membrane matrix that senses keypresses a

Re:An OS for your system?

[greenguy (162630)]

Oh, sure, Linux can handle a USB port. But can it handle a USB starboard?

If it requires a driver and a Linux driver is available

Didn't you RTFS? It has to be autonomous. That means no driver.

Re:but what *hardware* ?

[spinlight (1152137)]

The quickest way that I know of to get your computer to talk to your motors is through a USB Data AcQuisition device (DAQ, for short). When we built a prototype ROV, we bought an off-brand China special [hytekautomation.com] for about $80 that had drivers for LabView. You will also need a motor controller. Some DAQs have Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) motor controllers built into them, but these are not cheap, in my experience.

Hook your DAQ up to your control computer (we used windows), and then your motor controllers to your DAQ. The power supply that powers the motors (12 V DC or more) goes into the motor controllers, and the signal from the DAQ goes into the motor controllers (USB is 5ish V DC, I think). The power to the motors comes out of the motor controllers, according to however you program it in Labview.

We used an Open Source Motor Controller [robotpower.com] (OSMC) that we built from parts.
We used the system to vary the speed to 4 motors on the fly, using a computer interface that accepted input from a mouse and keyboard (just like Half-Life... sorta).