DAV Hits Another Milestone: the Autonomous Boat Mission

We are pleased to announce that we have completed DAV’s autonomous boat milestone in a joint effort with the University of California Maritime Academy.

Dubbed “n3m0”, the boat was tasked with patrolling a set of waypoints in San Francisco’s Bay Area and taking oceanographic measurements. The boat is autonomous: it is given a set of orders and constraints, and it decides how best to fulfill its mission.

n3m0 is powered electrically. When it determines that its battery level has gone down beyond a certain threshold, the boat sends out requests for charging using the DAV network. When someone responds, the boat meets the responder, receives a charge, and then heads back out to continue its mission.

The boat finds and communicates with potential charging providers over the DAV network. This milestone is important in that it proves that the discovery and communication functions of the network are robust and can facilitate contact between transport assets, autonomous or otherwise.

You can see live updates from n3m0 at its Twitter account here.