AVATAR DEMONSTRATION 3
In the AVATAR Interreg North Sea Region project on highly autonomous sailing and city freight distribution, several demonstrations of the new developed technologies are foreseen.
The KU Leuven catamaran vessel Maverick was demonstrated in Leuven on the 20th of April. At this event, the Intelligent Mobile Platforms research group presented the hardware and software architecture of the vessel, and demonstrated the vessel's sailing and manoeuvring behaviour. Furthermore, basic automated behaviour of the vessel was demonstrated by means of following waypoints over a 500m trajectory at the Vaart in Leuven. As such, this automated waypoint follower showed a first, realtime autonomy integration between the external sensor box and the vessel.
The Intelligent Mobile Platforms research group at KU Leuven developed a catamaran vessel named the "Maverick" within the European Interreg project AVATAR. The vessel is equipped with two fully-electric 360 degree rotating propellers. The Maverick can carry a load of one tonne, and is moreover equipped with multiple balancing tanks. The vessel can be controlled manually, remotely (from a remote control centre), and by means of an onboard computer using control software that can automate various navigation tasks of the Maverick. The vessel has limited hard-integrated onboard sensors, and instead seemingly integrates with an external sensor box that combines advanced sensors such as LiDAR, cameras, GNSS, and IMU. As such, the Maverick's main intelligence component is this external sensor box that can communicate with the actuation system of the vessel.
The demonstration 3 took place during an AVATAR event in Leuven, see also https://lnkd.in/eBEvV9JS.
More info about the Maverick: here and here.
See also the AVATAR LinkedIn message (including a video).
The demonstration event also received some media attention (see here) and has been mentioned in the Autobarge project, see here.
Impressions of the third AVATAR demonstration event:
(c) Tom Pauwels
(c) Tom Pauwels
(c) Tom Pauwels
(c) Tom Pauwels
(c) Tom Pauwels