Sensor platform

The platform for data collection is a 5 m long aluminum boat with 0.5 m draft. The basic sensor platform consists of:

  • A GNSS system with three antennas.
  • Real-time kinematic positioning (RTK) capabilities.
  • A fibre optic gyro IMU system.
  • Four single-channel high-performance vision sensors.
  • Two three-channel high-performance vision sensors.
  • A 360° documentation camera system.
  • Three high-performance laser range scanners.
  • A conventional marine 360° spinning radar sensor.
  • A weather and barometric pressure sensor.
  • An automatic identification system (AIS) receiver.

All sensors are extrinsically calibrated into a joint reference frame, where the GNSS sensor and the IMU jointly provides ground truth positioning.

SymbolTypeQty.Sensor
IMU1KVH P-1775
GNSS1 (3 ant.)Anavs MSRTK
Monochrome camera4Flir ORX-10G-71S7M-C
EO 16mm f/4 1″ HPr lens (43.2°)
RGB camera2Flir ORX-10G-71S7C-C
EO 16mm f/4 1″ HPr lens (43.2°)
360° documentation camera2 (8 cam.)Axis F44
Lidar1Ouster OS1
Lidar2Ouster OS2
Marine radar (X-band)1Simrad Halo 20+
Wind sensor 1Wind Observer 65
Radio (AIS & VHF)1RTL-SDR

Sensor positions: Pictures from the boat

An overview of the sensor platform. Each dot in the image below correspond to a sensor. All sensors are calibrated into the same coordinate frame.

On-board logging equipment

The logging equipment consists of two data center servers, each equipped with:

  • Two AMD EPYC 7352 CPUs (four in total).
  • 128 GB memory.
  • Four 16 TB Seagate Exos SATA disk drives.
  • One 15.36 Micron 9300 NVMe U.2 SSD (3.5 GB/s write).
  • One 2 TB Samsung 980 PRO NVMe M.2 SSD (5.1 GB/s write).
  • One Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080.
  • One Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000.

The cameras and lidars are connected on dedicated 10 GbE network interfaces. The IMU is connected via RS-485 through a dedicated computational unit. All computational nodes run Linux kernel 5.x with PREEMPT_RT activated. The system is connected to the Internet using a 4G link. All computational nodes are time synchronized using PTP through a common global clock synced through GPS, except for the Axis system which is synchronised using local NTP.