RoboBoat Competition- 2/28/26

The team went to Sarasota Florida in late February for the 3rd RoboBoat competition. Roboboat is a vision based autonomous competition that demands teams to build ASVs(Autonomous Surface Vehicle) to complete missions in the wild. With 14 team members ranging from middle schoolers to college students, the team won 1st place Website, 4th place Overall Design Documentation and local & global impactship award. The team was represented by Chase Chen (Captain & Software Lead), Cesar Barranco(Mechanical Lead & Electrical), Parsa Sedighi, Jayden Breesam and other supporting members. The team recruit a lot members from SDSU (SanDiego State University) and Mesa Impactship program, significantly increase the number of participants(14 compares to 7 members last year). Majority of the team members have less than 1 year robotics experience and some are even first time competing in robotics competition.

With the new challenge this year for Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC), the team decided to create a second ASV, as a learning opportunity for all the new members under the guidance of our mentor Colin Szeto. The team decided to manufacture a similar catamaran boat hull to retain the station keeping capability while increasing stability in all directions with the optimized manufacturing process. 

The new reporting requirement and mapping challenges direct the team to focus on raising the robot's awareness of its surroundings. The team shifted its code base from pure python threading to ROS2 to further develop capability to map mission elements. We’d like to thank UCSD CSE 145/237 Capstone project students for their help in developing sensor fusion capability on the boat. The team communicated with other teams like ITS, SeaSentinal and many others to learn how other teams map the course. 

There are 36 teams on site for competition and only two teams bring a second vehicle to the competition. With this year’s tight schedule within 5 days, the team focused on qualifying one vehicle for semi finals in the first 2 days. By the 4th day, the team was able to qualify both vehicles for the semi final with the second vehicle qualifying within a day. 

Congratulations to Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember (ITS) for becoming the RoboBoat 2026 champion. We would like to thank the RoboNation staff as well as the Office of Naval Research for continuing RoboNation competitions. Finally, thanks to all of our sponsors for their support - without you, the opportunity to compete at events such as this would not be possible.

We are getting ready to compete in the RoboSub 2026 competition. See you in Irvine!