AMOS's New Year Resolutions

Happy New Year! I thought it would be kind of cool to write some software that could parse all of the AMOS ship logs that I saved throughout last year, in order to get a summary of how far AMOS had traveled. Each ship log is just a text file that saves various parameters and debugging information, including a GPS position that gets recorded every minute. These GPS positions can be used to estimate the total distance that AMOS traveled throughout 2018:

I guess you can't really say much about AMOS's sea-worthiness, given that it has only traveled 31.3 km, but it is a starting point of sorts. In total there were 30 trips made, the longest of which was a 5.2 km out and back trip at Cap Brûlé. Some of those trips were under manual remote control, but most of them were autonomous, with a pre-programmed route. A significant percentage of the trips ended (usually quickly) in a failure of some sort: stuck in seaweed, dead batteries, stuck on rocks, loss of communications, invalid GPS route planning, software crashes and bugs, electrical failures / short-circuits, etc.

Had you asked me back in March how much total distance AMOS would be able to cover in 2018 I'm not sure what I would have said. Maybe 100 km? 500 km? Hopefully more? Given this starting point though, I think that 2019 will need to see some significant improvements. I would like to have everything working reliably enough that I could actually leave it unattended for at least 8 hours. For every minute that AMOS spent on the water this past year, I was either following closely in my kayak or watching from shore, making sure it didn't get "lost" or crash into anything. Unexpected problems were just too frequent to do otherwise. If it can attain a good level of reliability, where it can actually be trusted to function on its own for 8+ hours at a time, it should be able to travel much greater distances. For New Year's resolutions, I would like to see AMOS get 1000+ total km in 2019, with a maximum trip distance of at least 50 km. Reaching these goals is a necessary step in getting a robot that people might actually consider buying.