The Rise of Resilient Autonomous Vessels
Purdue and SAAB are joining forces to develop “self-healing” autonomous surface vessels—boats that can hold position, dock themselves, avoid hazards, and even recover from damage like a failing motor. Their approach blends human-machine teaming with adaptive autonomy: from full self-parking to shared control where a captain handles throttle while onboard intelligence manages precision steering. Alongside robust control algorithms, the team is designing intuitive visual interfaces to keep operators confident and in the loop. Early tests on a small lake show promising resilience and reliability, with the long-term vision aimed squarely at scaling these capabilities to larger vessels navigating real oceans.
Transcript
00:00:05 -This is a collaborative project with SAAB. The faculty and students from different disciplines, they have come together to create robust algorithms for self-healing autonomous surface vehicles. The basic behavior that the boat needs to do is stay in one place, which is station keeping. And then there are other safety critical tasks that the boat has to do. For example, avoid obstacles, docking. They will do a slip docking or parallel docking. -SAAB and Purdue are looking at a lot of different ways that you can use this technology. What we're trying to do here is human machine teaming. And the idea is that have a human that is assisted by our algorithms. -There are different levels of autonomy that is desired at any time. The human operates but the autonomy package and safety filters
00:01:15 assist the human to do the work safely. Full autonomy is when the vehicle park itself from the beginning to the end on its own. And then there is also another level of autonomy where, let's say the captain just do the throttle, and the autonomy package do the steering. And that's a happy medium, especially if it is a very challenging environment. The user experience is as important as the algorithms themselves. So we have worked a lot as part of this project in visual representation and visual guide for users. -One of the problems that we're trying to deal with here is how to deal with degradations or damage. For example, if a motor has been damaged and we lose efficiency on one side of our vessel, how does the vessel recover from that situation? We're trying to bring that kind of robustness to unmanned surface vessels. -We are very proud of what we have seen today.
00:02:17 Right now we are validating and implementing and testing on a small boat on a small lake. But our hope and goal is to implement this on bigger vessels out in real world and oceans.