You may have noticed the name of the category has morphed from “Dive Log” to “Adventure Log” and that’s because, well, the BB doesn’t really dive, now, does it! We know BB hasn’t been out in the wild for THAT long yet, but we know this crew is an active bunch and we are very curious to learn what journeys these boats are going on. If you haven’t taken them out yet, what are your big hopes and dreams for them??? Basically, please just tell us everything you’re willing to share, pictures STRONGLY encouraged!
Thanks Elisa!
Currently just a Lowrance transducer for shallow seagrass mapping, with a forward looking camera for collision avoidance and a planar DWE camera for seabed inspection/photogrammetry. The plan is to increase the bouyancy and fit it out with a slidable central pole mount for sidescan sonar and/or a WASSP multibeam (again, primarily for seagrass mapping)!
Hi there,
I’m happy to report our first successful automomous mission with the BlueBoat.
We are in facts researching obstacle avoidance solutions for autonomous sailboats but to make testing of sensors and algorithms easier we run a sailboat simulation and track the virtual sail boat with the blueboat.
The blueboat does behave as a sailboat and we can see what the sailboat would perceive and evaluate its trajectories.
It sounds a bit far fetched I know but this is interesting research for us and in the end, from the blueboat’s point of view, this application is basically dynamic trajectory tracking.
I’ll upload photos and videos when we’re back in the lab.
I would also like to report that due to an uncontrolled series of events, we ended up using the blueboat in RC mode to pull a 250m long BlueRov tether from one boat to another passing between two rocky islands in a 20 knots wind and Michel Le Blue (that’s his name now) did a great job. I was genuinely impressed by the thrusting power and stability of the BlueBoat even though the conditions were pretty rough!
I’m starting to document my journey with the BlueBoat, here’s a video of some of my initial testing! Looked at the turn radius, underwater footage of the props, and autonomous waypoints.
