Development of USV Autonomy for the 2014 Maritime RobotX Challenge

The inaugural Maritime RobotX Challenge competition was held in Marina Bay, Singapore between October 20-26 in 2014. The competition composed of five mission tasks in which intelligence is the single most important factor, and all the mission tasks were required to be performed autonomously with no human intervention. We participated in the competition as the KAIST team with our own unmanned surface vehicle integrated with various sensors for autonomous navigation and perception. All the software algorithms for vehicle autonomy including mission management, environmental perception, path planning and control were developed and applied in the actual competition. This paper describes the given mission tasks of the competition and how the vehicle intelligence and control algorithms were designed in order to perform those mission tasks autonomously.