[LRUG] Tracking robot boats - can you help?

[Thomas Kluyver]

Hi everyone,

We're organising the World Robotic Sailing Competition in Southampton this summer. This is an annual contest where teams from a number of countries build autonomous sailing boats - all the motive power must come from the wind - and take part in a set of challenges over four days. Many teams are based at universities, but there have also been startup teams, family teams, and even teams from some countries' navies. A group of us at Southampton Uni competed in the last two years, and it was a really interesting challenge.

To help run the competition, we've inherited the code of a Rails-based tracking server written a few years ago. It receives data from GPS trackers attached to the boats, and shows the tracks of boats on a map, either in real time or replaying a saved track. However, none of us know Ruby, and there are a thousand other things to get ready before the competition, on top of our regular jobs/studies. This (I hope) is where you lovely people come in! Are you interested in working on this system?

You can see the code at: https://github.com/WRSC/tracking

At least one of the challenges we're planning this year will require new functionality on the tracking site, and I suspect that improvements are possible in areas like UI, testing and performance.

To be clear, this isn't a job - the competition is organised and run by volunteer effort, so we're hoping that someone finds it interesting enough to spend some spare time on. But if you're free in late August, you'd be welcome to come down to Southampton to see the competition.

Get in touch with us at sotonsailrobot at gmail.com if you're interested. :-)

Thanks,
Thomas

P.S. If you're interested in entering the competition, or you know someone who might be, there's still time - we can give tips on how to get started.