Development of an Unmanned Surface Vehicle System for the 2014 Maritime RobotX Challenge

This paper addresses the development of an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) system by Team Angry‐Nerds from KAIST for the inaugural Maritime RobotX Challenge competition, which was held on October 20‐26, 2014, in Marina Bay, Singapore. The USV hardware was developed on a catamaran platform by integrating various system components, including propulsion, sensors, computer, power, and emergency systems. The competition comprised five mission tasks: 1) navigation and control, 2) underwater search and report, 3) automatic docking, 4) buoy search and observation, and 5) obstacle detection and avoidance. Onboard intelligence was a key factor for all of the mission tasks which needed to be performed autonomously with no human intervention. Software algorithms for vehicle autonomy were developed, and executable computer codes were implemented and integrated with the developed USV hardware system. This paper describes the development process of the USV system and its application to the competition mission tasks.