Android Boat

[Vincent Cate]

My boys and I are building an Android Solar Boat.   We are in the Caribbean and hope to be able to have it go to other islands:

http://www.islandboys.ai/

[Nicolas Oros]

really cool project!

[Vincent Cate]

We are doing a crowdfunding campaign to get money to build a larger solar boat.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/quadmaran-10-toward-solar-boats-for-ocean-living/x/6305068

[Vincent Cate]

By the ways, the boat really works:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PpHm470-Yn0

[Nicolas Oros]

really nice!

Looking forward to see a swarm of these boats sailing on the ocean ;-)

[Vincent Cate]

My crowdfunding raised enough to fund the electronics on the second boat, so I ordered those yesterday.

I want the two boats to be able to dock together automatically.   I have magnets on flexible tubes that make it so we just have to get within about 1 inch for a moment and it will link up.   The two boats can help each other by moving or turning.  They have compasses, so they can line up

I want to use some image recognition/understanding software on the phone to recognize the other boat to help with the final navigation.  GPS can get the boats nearby, but I need something else to do the final navigation. 

Can anyone recommend some vision software for Android phones?

I can make it really easy, like having a flashing light or reflective red tape when the whole ocean is blue.
So it is almost so simple I could write something myself, but I rather not.

Thanks.

[Vincent Cate]

I could even pulse some sound from the target boat and have stereo usb microphones to figure out where the sound was coming from and which way to go.   Only need left or right decision, so this might really work. 

Would be more fun to do vision though.  And with vision we should be able to link up with a completely dead boat, which one relying on sound from the target could not.

[Nicolas Oros]

For vision, you can use openCV:

http://docs.opencv.org/doc/tutorials/introduction/android_binary_package/O4A_SDK.html

We used it for some ABRs:

http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~jkrichma/ABR/index.html#Autonomous Vehicle

There is also fastCV from Qualcomm:

https://developer.qualcomm.com/mobile-development/add-advanced-features/computer-vision-fastcv

Also, if you want the robots to communicate between themselves (and your laptop/phone), you could use wi-fi direct. Using this, the robots would create a local wireless network and would be connected to each other. I would be curious to see how well this works on the ocean.

[Vincent Cate]

Thanks!  Those look like just what I need.

  -- Vince