Boat that sails alone will monitor pollution in Guanabara Bay

A new boat will sail around Guanabara Bay in search of changes in water quality. The novelty is that, as it is controlled by artificial intelligence, the F-Boat, a project by the Fluminense Federal University (UFF) and Niterói City Hall (RJ), does not require a crew to analyze environmental data in real time.

With rudder, sail and hull, the F-Boat looks like a conventional sailboat that is three meters long. But, inside, it has cameras, sensors and a mini-supercomputer that will analyze the pH, temperature and turbidity of the water, focusing on possible risks such as waste leaks and pollution.

The project began two years ago at the request of the Municipality of Niterói, which has invested in partnerships with universities for innovation. In an announcement, UFF professors Esteban Walter Gonzalez Clua and Daniel Dias presented the idea and were approved by the municipal secretary of the Environment.

Clua coordinates the Medialab research group, which develops new technologies with artificial intelligence. “It may sound like an exaggeration, but in the not-too-distant future, driving is going to be an awkward task,” he said, referring to the race to develop autonomous vehicles around the world.

The team of researchers spent BRL 100,000 on the development of the F-Boat, an amount that included handcrafted instruments, 3D printing of the hull and purchase of processors. The cost of the next smart sailboats, however, should decrease when the project gains scale.

Today, the vessel already sails alone. An artificial intelligence, fed by information from sensors and cameras installed on the sailboat, controls navigation choices in the face of wind or obstacles. But, even making decisions of its own, the technology is still undergoing improvements.

This type of machine is always learning, Clua said. Artificial intelligence follows a policy of rules and is punished if it makes mistakes – a process called reinforcement learning.

But on the smart sailboat, this type of learning takes place in a virtual environment. Autonomous transports can bring risks to the safety of the population when trained in the real world.

So Clua and his team created digital clones (digital twins) to teach the boat how to navigate. “They are replicas of the vehicle and the entire surrounding ecosystem in digital media,” she said. Then, this virtual learning is transferred to the physical system.

Both the public and private sectors participated in the F-Boat project, with emphasis on Faperj (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro), the Navy and the company NVIDIA, which provided technologies for the boat.

Márcio Aguiar, director of NVIDIA’s Enterprise division for Latin America, said that the company has a long history of working with the researcher responsible for the boat, which facilitated the partnership.

NVIDIA provided the team with NVIDIA Xavier hardware –a miniature supercomputer that processes data in real time–, computer vision software and a platform to train the digital clones called “Omniverse”.

“The F-Boat is a niche project, but it is reaching large scales,” he said. For the executive, who sees Brazil as competitive in relation to other countries in the area, the use of machines with the power of artificial intelligence is here to stay.

In addition to guiding navigation, the sailboat’s artificial intelligence will process data from the water in Guanabara Bay for Niterói City Hall in real time. The monitoring innovation is in the mobility that the vehicle brings. Today, inspection is done by fixed points.

“The cost of taking this system from one place to another would be very high”, stated Clua, from the UFF. With the F-Boat, the mapping will be more dynamic and with a higher probability of success due to the amount of data analyzed.

One of the challenges, according to the professor, is to convince civil servants in the environmental area to trust artificial intelligence analyses, as they are not yet familiar with this methodology.

There are also limitations on the vessel’s activities, such as, for example, capturing data on fecal coliforms in the water, which still require collection and laboratory examination.

In the researcher’s evaluation, the sailboat can be seen as a project designed for smart cities because it has the collaboration of artificial intelligence for the well-being of the population of Niterói.

Alessandra Cristina Corsi, a researcher at the Technological Research Institute (IPT) in São Paulo and a specialist in the field of environmental management, agrees with the assessment.

In smart cities, Corsi explained, the government collects, processes and makes data available so that the population has better access to services and is informed about different areas, such as the environment and mobility. The sailboat is going that way, she said.

According to the researcher, the idea of ​​producing information 24 hours a day is good, but without a system that coordinates data and decision-making, innovation loses strength. “Everything that is thought of as automating, sensing and making it intelligent needs to have an action built in”, she concluded.