SVE Performance Update:

Here is the summary:
1. Path Description: We have the test run from South side to PNC park and from PNC Park to Washington Landings. The total path length was around 10 Kilometers.
2. Velocity and time check: We were moving with an constant velocity of around 4.5 m/s and we were able to cover the distance of 2 miles in less than 15 minutes (which was stated in our requirements)
3. Re-planning: The system was constantly re-planning during the test run and the re-planning time was less than 5 sec (as stated in the requirements)
4. Rules of the road: Boat was following rules of the road by making sure that it was always on the right side of the river.
5. Obstacle avoidance: We encountered various obstacles during the path including shores, barge, 8 buoyes and pylons. We are able to to avoid all of them successfully.
6. Crossing bridges: We were also able to go under the bridges successfully.
7. GUI: GUI gave the functionality to select from pre-determined destinations and also the ability to select any destination in the rivers of Pittsburgh by clicking on the map. All these features worked perfectly during SVE.

Future work/Areas of improvements.
1. Path Quality: Right now sometimes boat takes zig-zag path. This can be improved further by adding more motion primitives
2. Variable Velocity: At present the boat runs with constant velocity, functionality for making it run with variable velocities can be added (like slow speed on turns and fast speed while moving straight).
2. Avoiding Dynamic Obstacles: Right now we don’t take into account the dynamic obstacle avoidance. We have kept the range of the radar shorted so we can detect high speed obstacles. Also, our planning algorithms treat all obstacles as static.
4. Docking: We were only giving the waypoints which are not near the shores. So, autonomous docking can be a good feature addition

Fall Semester Progress:
We were successfully able to demonstrate most of the experiments that we promised for FVE. The summary of the results of our experiments performed during FVE are shown below.

Fall 2015 Experiments

Below are the experiments that we had at the end of spring semester.
 

Spring 2016 Experiments