Autonomous Boats
The ground vehicle guidance computer works just as well in a boat, maybe better since there are fewer obstacles. The small tugboat shown here is a easy-to-operate test bed for the guidance computer, it showed that the car algorithms worked without modification. The boat platform is a commercially available kit called the vacu-tug, with the computer installed along with a radio, and a mechanical switch to determine whether the boat obeys the command of the autopilot or the radio.
Tugboat Video (6 MB) Shows the tugbot heading out to a waypoint and returning on lake Merced (not very high quality video)
This paper has some tugboat details as well.
A larger project is underway to build a boat that is still quite small (about 5 feet long), but that has the ability to carry about 10 pounds of extra sensing equipment for water quality monitoring. This boat will carry a separate computer to log the data and will deliver it to the operator's laptop computer via the serial port after the mission is complete.
