Sailbot

Overview

Sailbot is a robotics club I’ve been a part of at Pitt for the past 4 years. We compete anually at the International Robotics Sailing Regatta where we’ve managed to place 3rd (4 years in a row, banking on first this year!). I’ve worked on a lot over the years and haven’t been the best at taking the time to document on this site. However, here’s a few of the things I’ve learned and built:

• Navigation for various events to demonstrate autonomous GPS navigation, search and rescue and other behavior

• Controlling embedded GPS, IMU, RC receivers, water sensors and motors with our microcontroller

  • I’ve made many changes from new things I’ve learned over the years. This led me to implement a Hardware-Abstraction-Layer to manage the dozens of configurations and different boats we have.
  • SPI/I2C/UART protocols

• Data serialization & DDS with protocol buffers and ROS2

• CI/CD testing & linting with Github Actions

• A Pan-Tilt-Zoom camera running an AI object detection I trained using YOLOV8 and a custom dataset I painfully labeled

• Front-end and documentation with building our main site and using mkdocs to build documentation for our new members

• A robotics GUI built in Flutter

• (modest) PCB prototyping fundamentals so I can coordinate with our electrical team

  • Multimeter/Oscilloscope debugging
  • Soldering
  • Wire crimping
  • Understanding datasheets