CAPTAIN NEMO - ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The World's most Advanced Artificially Intelligent Robot Boat

8. CAPTAIN NEMO

Captain Nemo is the missing link, a program (software) that ties all the electronics hardware and independent software systems together into a cohesive package, to simulate a boat that is artificially intelligent. Captain Nemo listens to all the information coming in and makes global decisions. For example, 'Bruce' the autopilot may be happily cruising a vessel across the Atlantic, oblivious to the presence of an oil tanker on a collision path. The radar and other visual sensors have picked up the oil tanker and share this information with Captain Nemo, which interrupts Bruce and takes evasive action, having first warned (radioed) the oil tanker. After the crisis is over, Captain Nemo re-engages Bruce - and the ship carries on safely to her next waypoint.

SUB-PACKAGES

A computer graphical interface is to be designed in Microsoft Visual C#  -  A simultaneous Google Maps Interface is also to be written using Microsoft Visual C# hooked into javascript for real time monitoring and waypoint routing comparison with vector charts (autopilot) for the autonomous SolarNavigator.

The system will need to work with GPS coordinates, as GPS sensors will be used for determining the SolarNavigator's actual position on the planet. The purpose of having two systems running side by side is to check one against the other. The progress of the craft may be seen by anyone with an internet connection on Google Maps - anywhere on the planet.

There are several common ways of referring to a point on or near the surface of the earth: LLA, ENU/LTP, and ECEF:-

1. LLA stands for Latitude-Longitude_Altitude. These are coordinates in a spherical 3-space, though altitude refers to distance from the earth’s surface, not the origin. This system is commonly used by mapping tools and GPS consumer units.

2. ENU/LTP is called East-North-Up or Local Tangent Plane. It refers to a three-space on top of a plane tangential to the earth’s surface at a specific point (the origin). This is used commonly for navigation because the difference between the plane position and the position on the actual earth is negligible until about 800 kilometers

3. ECEF stands for Earth-Centered Earth-Fixed and it is a Cartesian 3-space with the origin at the center of the earth, as implied by the name. As the axes are tied to positions on the earth, such as the North Pole and the Prime Meridian, points in ECEF are fixed on the Earth’s surface. This coordinate system assumes that the earth is an ellipsoid, which is not perfectly accurate, but much more accurate than taking a spherical model and only moderately more complex when used in calculations. The way this is done is by generating ENU coordinates (with east and north determined by the distance the vessel moved during the time step) using the current boat position as the origin of the plane. These ENU coordinates are then converted to Earth-Centered Earth-Fixed coordinates as an intermediate step towards converting them to Latitude/Longitude-Altitude, which is the final output.

Safety is a key issue concerning autonomous devices, since uncontrolled behaviour of a vessel at sea can result in harm to humans. This has been referred to as the 1st rule of robotics - not to harm humans.

To avoid malfunction or program crash from becoming an issue, a modular approach ensures that each program is constantly watching and comparing information with its neighbor via middleware sometimes referred to as DDX (Digital Direct Xtra) or ROS (Robot Operating System).

For instance, sensor modules publish their information as variables in the so-called DDX store, where other program modules can read this published variables and publish other variables themselves. A second approach is a robotic watchdog program which monitors all running programs and restarts programs that go down. All program modules have been written in a way that they can be restarted at any time. Both approaches, the modular programming and the watchdog approach are to be evaluated where ROS may provide a superior solution and follows:

The middleware ROS (Robot Operating System) was initially released in 2007, and gained popularity in the robotics research community since then. It is now developed, maintained and improved by a large team of both software and robotics engineers at Willow Garage Inc.

On the base level ROS enables single executables (called nodes) to communicate by letting them publish and subscribe to data streams (called topics), which are transmitted over a TCP network. This also enables ROS nodes to interact, even if they run on different machines. Additionally, ROS includes a large set of tools to visualize, log, and analyse the messages that are published on ROS topics. ROS also provides many higher level features specially tailored for robotics applications.

Modularity 

The structure of ROS is highly modular and allows to only run the parts that are required. Furthermore custom nodes can be combined with existing ones. As ROS is Open-Source-Software, it can be altered to specific
needs.

Maintenance 

ROS is developing fast and software updates are offered frequently. The comparatively large user community, that consists of researchers at universities all around the world, provides the necessary operating experience to
improve the system iteratively.

Diversity 

The diversity of ROS and its tools is constantly growing without compromising its modularity. It offers many possibilities to easily analyse and improve custom ROS nodes. 

Uniformity 

One of the goals of this project is to standardize the middleware for similar projects to simplify adaptation and/or  re-use and co-developing software packages.

1. MODEL PROGRESS

2. BRUCE THE AUTOPILOT & A BIT MORE

3. STAR WARS - DRONE SATELLITE REMOTE CONTROL, MANUAL OVERRIDE

4. HAL COMPUTER HARDWARE

5. NAVIGATION INSTRUMENTS

6. THE EYES AND EARS - HAWKEYE

7. SELF DEFENCE - SCORPION

8. CAPTAIN NEMO - AI ROBOT

9.  LOCAL NAVIGATION EVENT

10. INTERMEDIATE CIRCUMNAVIGATION

11. THE AUTONOMOUS CIRCUMNAVIGATION

LINKS

www.eng.uah.edu/~fahimi/Platform_Boat.html

www.gps4us.com/GPS-independent-navigation-system-for-autonomous-vessels

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodetic_system

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECEF

www.apl.washington.edu/projects/seaglider/summary
www.seaglider.washington.edu/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRobot_Seaglider
Tropical Boats

http://wiki.rocrail.net/ddx

http://www97.homepage.villanova.edu/hashem.ashrafiuon

PROJECT LINKS

This website is copyright © 2013 Electrick Publications. All rights reserved. The bird logo and names Solar Navigator and Blueplanet Ecostar are trademarks ™.  The Blueplanet vehicle configuration is registered ®.  All other trademarks hereby acknowledged and please note that this project should not be confused with the Australian: 'World Solar Challenge'™which is a superb road vehicle endurance race from Darwin to Adelaide.  Max Energy Limited is an educational charity working hard to promote world peace.