ARSEM (Autonomous Robotic Sailboat for Environmental Monitoring)

ARSEM (Autonomous Robotic Sailboat for Environmental Monitoring) is a student-built autonomous sailboat designed to navigate and collect environmental ocean data without human intervention or external fuel. The vessel relies on wind for propulsion and solar energy to power its onboard electronics, offering a low-cost solution for monitoring remote oceanic regions where traditional sensor buoys or research vessels are too expensive or impractical to deploy.

The sailboat's architecture brings together physical structural design, rudder and sail control algorithms, and a robust electronics/comms stack. To sail autonomously, the system processes real-time inputs from GPS and Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs), running path planning algorithms and inverse kinematics to dynamically adjust the rudder and sail angle against changing wind directions.

My role focused on the electronics and communications subsystem. I designed the internal serial communication architecture to link our onboard chips (specifically connecting the servo controller, the Raspberry Pi Pico master chip, and the communications chip). I also designed a custom transmission protocol for our LoRa radio modules to pass telemetry and data back and forth, programmed the C-based request handling logic on the master chip (Pico SDK), and contributed to the project's academic proposal and literature review.