  Robotic software and hardware systems of autonomous surface vehicles have
been developed in transportation, military, and ocean researches for decades.
Previous efforts in RobotX Challenges 2014 and 2016 facilitates the
developments for important tasks such as obstacle avoidance and docking. Team
NCTU is motivated by the AI Driving Olympics (AI-DO) developed by the
Duckietown community, and adopts the principles to RobotX challenge. With the
containerization (Docker) and uniformed AI agent (with observations and
actions), we could better 1) integrate solutions developed in different
middlewares (ROS and MOOS), 2) develop essential functionalities of from
simulation (Gazebo) to real robots (either miniaturized or full-sized WAM-V),
and 3) compare different approaches either from classic model-based or
learning-based. Finally, we setup an outdoor on-surface platform with
localization services for evaluation. Some of the preliminary results will be
presented for the Team NCTU participations of the RobotX competition in Hawaii
in 2018.
