Monday, February 19, 2018

AMOS (Autonomous Mini (or Microbial?) Ocean Surveyor

I have ignored this Blog for a while, but am starting it up again to chronicle the development of an exciting new project: AMOS (Autonomous Mini (or Microbial?) Ocean Surveyor. I have been wanting to do something in robotics for a while, and had toyed around a bit with ideas for a robot to pickup household clutter, or a robot for watering gardens, but then after an evening of watching various TED talks about robotics, I had a sudden inspiration: why not make a robot boat that could take water samples at multiple locations and measure microbial concentrations of those samples?

My family has been vacationing at Parlee Beach, NB for nearly all of my life, but the beach has been in the news recently for problems of E.coli and other bacteria in the water. Current testing has revealed the problem to be serious, but so far the sources of contamination have not been definitively identified. Also, the testing that has been taking place has been time consuming and laborious, and generally confined to the main beach itself. I thought it would be cool if the testing area could be expanded, and also simplified, so as to take a shorter length of time between sample collection and final test results.

Due to the ambitious nature of this quest, I have gone to half-time employment at my regular day job, but will still continue to do some contract work on the side, to help make ends meet. The extra hours freed up will be dedicated to making AMOS a reality.

So far the beginning is small, just a raspberry PI Compute module with a couple of Pi V2 Camera modules:


This weekend I have been toying with a couple of different OpenCV library functions for feature detection. I would like to give AMOS some reasonable amount of computer vision so that it can identify obstacles on the open seas and avoid them whenever possible. I did some testing using Harris corner detection and the FAST algorithm for feature detection.

Harris Edge Detection

The FAST algorithm seemed to work a lot better and faster, so maybe it will form the basis of AMOS's object avoidance code.

FAST Feature Detection


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