Hello everyone,
My team and I are developing an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) for a university competition. Our USV is a catamaran equipped with a Jetson Nano for processing. The total budget for our vehicle, including all components, is $1900.
Competition Task
The goal of the competition is to autonomously navigate through a parkour with various obstacles. The USV must:
- Detect and classify obstacles,
- Plan a route around them,
- Complete the parkour as quickly as possible.
I have attached a file with the parkour details for better context.
Sensor Setup Options
We are evaluating different sensor configurations and would like to hear your opinions on their feasibility and efficiency:
- Monocular vision + LIDAR
- Monocular vision + AI-based depth estimation + LIDAR
- Stereo vision
- Stereo vision + LIDAR
Our primary concerns are accuracy and cost-effectiveness. We plan to develop accuracy enhancement, prediction, and verification algorithms to improve sensor performance. However, I have no prior experience with LIDAR, so I am unsure about its real-world accuracy in a marine environment.
Given our budget, processing limitations (Jetson Nano), and the need for fast and reliable obstacle detection, which sensor setup would you recommend? Any insights from your experience would be greatly appreciated!
Looking forward to your responses.
Best regards.