16.8.2023
The Åboat shows Turku from a new perspective
In the beginning of the summer a team from the department of Information Technology at Åbo Akademi University did a test with their autonomous boat on the Aura River in Turku, recording the riverbanks with a 360 degrees 4K camera. Now the material filmed by the boat can be viewed through Google Street View. The material which was uploaded to Google Street View in July has already been viewed over ten thousand times.
“We needed to test the remote-control functions of the boat and at the same time we recorded a video dataset of the river. Now that the material is available online everyone can take the opportunity to browse and ‘sail’ on the river and see Turku’s landmarks from a different perspective”, says Sébastien Lafond, Senior University Lecturer in Computer Engineering.
“This work was done in cooperation with William Thiaw-Woaye, a master’s student we hosted over the summer and studying at the school of engineering ESIGELEC in France. In the future we intend to develop new autonomous functions on the Åboat like automatic collision avoidance algorithms and equip the platform with new sensors to for example assess the quality of the water”, Lafond explains.
The autonomous boat project known as Åboat is led by the department of computer science at the faculty of science and engineering at ÅAU. Novia University of Applied Sciences is also involved in the project through the MAST! Institute, a research collaboration platform between ÅAU and Novia which focuses on maritime digitalization and smart shipping research and development.
Click here for a closer look at the Aura River!