Ground Station
The Ground Station team manages all software which exists onshore and is responsible for monitoring or controlling the boat while it is in the water. They configure a wireless network between the boat and the onshore system using two Ubiquiti bullets and a router to allow for SSH or websocket connection between an onshore laptop and the Jetson Xavier, the mini PC on the boat.
The group also designs and builds a user interface application for parsing boat transmissions into readable information and displaying information such as the boat’s position, sensor measurements, and autonomous decisions. This application is useful for debugging purposes during water testing. The ground station also includes the base station correction source for our GNSS sensor.
In the future, we hope to enable the user interface to change the boat’s state in real time (i.e. act as a remote controller) and improve the visualizations and graphics of the interface.