The way this project began is we went to the Navy and asked them what their research challenges were.
The Navy had a need to protect our coastlines from drug subs. What is a drug sub?
It's a very small submarine, has a single twin Diesel engines, can go approximately 2,000
miles. They're very, very difficult to detect. You can't see them from the sky.
You can't see them from satellite images. About the the only way that people have been
able to detect them is from the underwater
sound they create.
What's in there? Acoustic detection software!
What is is? Acoustic detection software, finding things underwater. Oh!
Our solution has been to create large numbers
of acoustic sensing vehicles that can detect these drug subs. And we quickly realized that
if we were going to make large numbers of these that we can spend a lot of time in the
lab sculpting foam and connecting things to foam, that we needed to get commercial parts.
So the base of our boat is a boogie board.
When I started working this summer they had two boats. So my first step was physically
manufacturing four other boats. The main platform is a boogie board and then two sub pumps for
propulsion, a hose from the sub pump to a nozzle, and then a bracket on the front and
the back to hold the sub pump and the hose.
And on top of this boogie board we have an
air-tight first-aid box that contains all of our equipment. So, let\'92s see. I actually
have never even just put everything in here. I don't even know that it's going to
fit. And that includes our two single-board computers, our acoustic data gathering equipment,
the batteries that we need to power this boat. So getting all the equipment to fit in is
quite a packing challenge.
Done!
So here's our vision: What we envision is a collection of our boats aligned along
the coastline, listening. We're actually going to take the acoustic signals being gathered
by our instruments and use those to control the swarm.
On each one of our boats we have a hydrophone
attached to it and it matches that hydrophone data with a GPS point.
It needs to be able to analyze the data that
it's receiving from the hydrophone and tell the other boats and itself to go there.
What we've done with our particular fleet of boats is try to mimic the kinds of scenarios
that the Navy faces in a realistic environment without paying millions of dollars for an
at-sea experiment.
Okay, so I have the first one as 42.317. Hold on one sec. So we're testing right now
hard-coded waypoints but the boat is driving autonomously to those waypoints. It's going
to make a triangle. It's going to go out and horizontally across the pond and then
come back. So that's this test that we're doing right now.
The field tests for these boats are intensely
challenging. We have a lot of components that all have to work together perfectly for a
boat to move and take its data, and then on top of that we have an awful lot of software
that has to work perfectly A student conducting a field test with these boats has a list of
about 100 things to worry about.
Alright, turning it to auto mode. Okay! So that's what we were seeing last time, and
let's just see if it keeps that. So yeah it does a circle - Yeah sometimes it. Woah,
woah. See it does? It's coming here. It's - something's going on. What is this waypoint
that it's trying to go to? And badly. We need to change the parameter. It wasn't
doing that before. We'll try the old parameters.
I love building things and I think that you
need an application, you need a driving force for the code that you write.
One of the exciting things, I think, for students
working on this project is it's not a paper study. We build real things. We do mathematical
research on them and develop algorithms on them and so forth. But at the end of the day
we go out and we put these things in water and we see what they do.
So we're going to set a waypoint on this
boat and put it in the water and see if it will go to that waypoint. Yup, here we go.
So we saw it turn, right, turn towards that direction. Smooth arc. Yup, and now it's
just heading that way. Looks great. So I think it's working. Yup. Yeah? It's perfect.
Alright!
Part of the reason why we've been so motivated this summer is because it's such a meaningful
project.
Working on this project for the Navy, trying to get acoustic detection software to work
to tell this swarm of boats where to go it's cool! And, like, I want to get up in the morning
and go do it.