Embry-Riddle Faculty Awarded Office of Naval Research Grant to Develop Autonomous Boat Curricula

With a strong record of designing award-winning uncrewed surface vehicles, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University is creating openly available training guides for autonomous boat builders at the high school through graduate school levels.

“Our project will be a great starting point for students and faculty where they don’t have to pull in pieces from ten different resources online and question how reputable they are,” said Dr. Eric Coyle, professor of Mechanical Engineering and the project's principal investigator. “Instead, we want to have one place they can go to get started on everything.”

The program, named EasyUSV, received a $600,000 grant from the Office of Naval Research.

The U.S. Navy plans to build fleets of autonomous boats as cost-effective alternatives to and in support of manned vessels, according to the proposal submitted for the grant. Doing so requires a workforce with an understanding of uncrewed surface vehicles (USV) technologies. To encourage such training, the Navy sponsors specialized programs, including the RoboBoat and Maritime RobotX competitions.

At these competitions, Coyle and his colleagues have observed gaps in resources and education. Coyle notes that many teams, particularly new teams and those without an experienced mentor, struggle with the basics uncrewed surface vehicle design and autonomy.

“By teaching high schoolers to understand the technology,” Coyle said, “when they get to college, they’re able to produce more advanced designs and performance.”

Providing that training to high school students, however, is difficult, he said.

“It’s a real challenge for someone mentoring a high school group to be able to provide guidance on what to do in terms of autonomy, how to pick out your sensors, etc.,” said Coyle. “If they’ve not built an uncrewed surface vessel before, it’s really hard to know what to consider until you basically run into a failure and realize it was the wrong option.”

The EasyUSV program will include step-by-step instructions for low-cost autonomous boat design and related educational resources, all of which will be hosted online by the nonprofit RoboNation. The program will also create a software development kit that explains basic autonomy concepts of sensor integration, navigation and perception. The program has organized a process to incorporate feedback from an advisory board representing Naval stakeholder organizations involved in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education and other STEM experts.

Additionally, Embry-Riddle has partnered with Volusia County, Florida, schools on the project. A STEM specialist will create educational resources for high school teachers on uncrewed surface vehicle technologies. Areas of focus include physics, manufacturing techniques, electricity and magnetism, sensor data and introductory computer programming.

“We would love for these resources to mature to the point they could be part of a formal high school curriculum,” Coyle said.

Joshuah Thyn, who is finishing up a bachelor’s degree and will start a master’s in Mechanical Engineering next semester, is working with Coyle. Thyn has an internship this summer at a company that makes uncrewed surface vehicles for the U.S. Navy. He said he thinks working on EasyUSV will give him “a major head start in the field.”

Also collaborating on the project are Mechanical Engineering faculty Dr. Patrick Currier, chair and professor; Dr. Monica Garcia, assistant professor; and Dr. Darris White, professor.

"We are very proud to be partnering with the Office of Naval Research, Volusia County schools and RoboNation on the EasyUSV project,” Coyle said. “This effort will leverage Embry-Riddle’s research and student competition experience to develop a toolkit enabling STEM students from high school through graduate school to design and build their own autonomous boats. It will be exciting to see what we can do over the next three years, and then to see it expand to a wide group of users in the future.”