An Intelligent Visual Sensing System for Unmanned Surface Vessels

Optical perception is essential for USVs to accomplish its diverse range of missions while working autonomously on the surface of water. USVs should have the abilities of automatically seeing and avoiding obstacles as well as recognizing navigation lights and day shapes in other vessels. The current technologies lack the ability to satisfactorily capture images and process the digital data and fail to meet performance requirements in terms of stabilization, coverage, range and obstacle detection. UtopiaCompression proposes an innovative Intelligent Visual Sensing (IVS) system that involves a panoramic camera and associated hardware and software components for supporting automatic contact detection and situational awareness for USVs. The camera provides a contiguous 360 degree field of view with uniform high resolution and image quality that is seamless, artifact-free, distortion-free and blur-free. We also develop system capabilities for stabilization, contact detection, navigation aid recognition, and range estimation. The system will have low size, weight and power (SWaP).