Sailbot (Autonomous Sailboat)
The project team will work together with students from the Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering section to design, build, and test an autonomous sailboat. The sailboat will be designed to compete in the International Sailbot Competition. Students from the Electrical Engineering section are responsible for the design of all navigational and robotic elements on the craft.Coordinated Autonomous Boating
This project seeks to employ autonomous assets to provide real‐time data to a central coordinating authority. Students will modify scale‐model sailing vessels to sail autonomously under the control of an onboard computer. Students will develop the sensor package and software needed to implement autonomous vessel‐to‐vessel communications. Students will explore possible applications for a fleet of autonomous sailboats. This project will focus on the sailing, navigation, asset coordination, and information sharing of three autonomous sailing vessels, assigned to gather data from a specific area.
Dynamic Positioning Systems
Rising failures of shipboard dynamic positioning systems due to computer, electrical, or thruster issues are of concern. The USCG Marine Safety Center (MSC) has taken note of the upward trends investigations of marine incidents. Students would build and outfit a water‐borne platform to test dynamic position failures. Students would then explore ways to model and better understand the mechanics of failures due to loss of reference position, loss of motor drive, and loss of thruster.
Field Response Emergency Deployable (FRED)
This project seeks to develop a low-cost, lightweight, portable system to aid in field analysis of data from USCG Differential Global Positioning System (DGPS) reference stations. Students will design a working FPGA-based DGPS receiver to calculate measures of interest to DGPS system operators and maintenance personnel.
Wireless Security
This project seeks to develop a low-cost, automatic wireless security tool for USCG wireless networks. The tool will automatically scan for active networks, monitor and flag possible threat activity, and notify appropriate personnel to take further action. Students will focus on the development of automatic wireless security algorithms and their implementation on low-cost commercially-available devices.
NMEA 2000 Data Recorder
The latest USCG small boats employ state-of-the-art NMEA 2000 sensors. The NMEA 2000 standard is significantly different from the previous NMEA 0183 standard. This project seeks to develop a shipboard NMEA 2000 sensor data recorder to save various data for analysis. Students will design and test a prototype NMEA 2000 sensor data recorder based on one of several popular microprocessors.