Adobe Stock-boxerx, Scout team
A
utonomous vehicles are complicated,
undoubtedly, but that didn’t stop us from
endeavoring to be the first to launch a successful
autonomous navigation of the Atlantic Ocean.
What began as a joke between college kids
quickly morphed into a challenge, an obsession,
and years later, careers in the industry and a
startup of our own.
The first iterations of the boat were designed
in 2010 with the goal of traversing the Atlantic
autonomously. Since it had never been done
before and the journey across the vast ocean was
largely unknown and mysterious, we called the
project Scout. The name was also a shout-out to
the Age of Empires video game whose scouts we
would send off exploring into dark dangerous
worlds during the wee hours of the morning.
The fateful joke that started the project was
cracked between Dylan Rodriguez and Max
Kramers in Max’s parents’ garage: They’d have
to build a robot boat to keep in touch while Max
studied in Spain. The project quickly wrapped in
more of the neighborhood crew, with Brendan
Prior and Dan Flanigan joining the fun. One day I
followed Dan, my older brother, into the garage to
see what the tinkering was all about.
That garage became the site of a hands-on
engineering and maker education for all of us.
After our summer jobs we would meet up to
sand, solder, and hack away at whatever the
current hurdle was. One of my favorite aspects
was the frequent pitstops at a whiteboard hanging
on the wall, where rapid lessons in basic circuits
would come from Dylan, stress and strain from
Dan, or lift and hydrodynamics from Max, then
after covering the background on why something
was being done, we’d jump back to building it.
The pace was fast and our target launch date ever
approaching. It was full commitment, bordering
on over-obsession.
But the project didn’t stop with a few kids in
a garage. Building an autonomous boat takes
a village, or in this case the town of Tiverton,
Rhode Island. The project quickly engulfed
parents, friends, neighbors, and much of the
local community. Some stopped in for an hour
of sanding; others made monumental efforts in
key technical areas. Tom Schindler knew Dylan
from FIRST Robotics and was psyched to add his
software skills to the team when we were closing
in on launch day. For Tom it was a no-brainer:
“These kids were up to something cool, and
as soon as I heard about the project, I wanted
in.” Mike Mills, owner of the local marine and
woodworking supply Jamestown Distributors,
offered to sponsor the project with all the
composite materials we needed.
Along with the moral support and helping
hands, there were quite a few chuckles at the
endless late nights and the sheer scope of the
ambitious endeavor. And with no successful
Atlantic crossings to date, despite dozens of
attempts by teams on either side of the ocean,
ambitious it was.
Building a Trans-Atlantic ASV
The initial design for Scout contained just the
basic requisite components: a motor from an R/C
airplane, an Arduino backbone, a rudder servo,
and a Tupperware to hold it all (see “Your Basic
DIY Autonomous Boat,” page 41).
But as the project evolved, so did the systems
needed for a true autonomous surface vehicle
(ASV). While neighbor Greg “Jonesy” Jones was
debugging signal noise issues, our young team
was busy implementing current sensing, data
telemetry, and a hacked GoPro intended to take a
few minutes of video each day. The original 3-foot
concept craft sank in a pond after an hour, but
from that soggy grave it returned and, through six
generations, grew to a craft measuring 12 feet.
One of the early iterations of Scout.
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