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. I’ve worked on a lot over the years and trying to document everything here is frankly impossible. However, for more in-depth information about our tech stack, I’ve kept our documentation site and codebase public. Keep in mind that these are live, and may have been changed significantly by other members since I’ve graduated.

Some of the major projects I’ve worked on and skills I’ve learned through Sailbot are listed below:

• Autonomy for various events to demonstrate GPS navigation, search and rescue and station keeping

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

  • Our software architecture has improved significantly as I’ve learned more over the years. Supporting a growing list of different hardware configurations & boats has led me to implement a Hardware-Abstraction-Layer. This enables different sensors, servos, pinouts, etc. to be swapped through a config so that we can manage our two continuously operating sailboats with a single codebase.

• 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 model trained on YOLOV8 with a custom dataset I painfully labeled

• Front-end for our homepage and documentation website built using mkdocs to onboard new members

• A robotics GUI built in Flutter

• PCB prototyping fundamentals so I can coordinate with our electrical team
  • Multimeter/Oscilloscope debugging
  • Soldering
  • Wire crimping
  • Understanding datasheets

• Management & soft-skills from coordinating a sub-team of ~12 students