cesarharada.com/blog

About Me

Cesar Harada (28) is an French-Japanese inventor and entrepreneur.
Cesar invented a ground-breaking sailing technology, a boat that changes shape, “Protei”. Originally developed to clean up the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Protei is an Open Hardware project now developed by an international community of scientists, engineers and designers for many other applications such as nuclear radiation sensing off Japan, plastic sensing in the Pacific garbage patch, red tide studies in Mexico and much more.
Cesar is also the general coordinator of the future International Ocean Station. Former Project leader at MIT, Cesar teaches Masters in Design & Environment at Goldsmiths University in London. Cesar graduated in 2009 from the Design Interactions course at the Royal College of Arts in London, his collaborative project Open_Sailing received the Ars Electronica Golden Nica award for the [NEXT IDEA].

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Protei-005


Also on youtube
http://protei.org

 

Protei-005 testing
20100911, Nabi Art Center, Seoul
By 
Open_Sailing | opensailing.net
randomwalks | randomwalks.org
at the Nabi Art Center in Seoul | nabi.or.kr
With the kind support of
V2_ | v2.nl
LA Bucket Brigade | labucketbrigade.org
Suzette Becker Toledano | suzettebecker.com

Protei-005's aim is to have the control on-board, no more remote controlling like 002, 003, the machine should sense its environment and make the decision where to go next. 

The test did not go so well, but we've learnt a lot on the way :
- the basic electronics (diagrams and pictures coming up soon on the http://protei.org) is pretty good, worked out of the water and provides a good extendable basis for future developments. 
- improved miniaturization
- simpler shape are easier to compute and evaluate (drag + turbulences) so that's also quite a good thing for simple dynamic engineering
BUT
the many cool things about Protei-005 is that we start to sketch a model for evaluation :) So, we have 
- wind sensor (direction + power) made from a Wiimote Nunchuck
- accelerometers on board, vibration sensors
- Xbee to send the information in real-time to a logging computer

We have a controlled environment so we can simulate wind, at the speed we like to. Hopefully next version we can do also waves and currents... :)
And even better, we have a webcam above the whole setting capturing the boat movement. So we have with Protei-005, not only a semi-autonomous machine but also a good indoor evaluation setup. Eventhough the test wasn't impressive (not bad for 3 days of work on a robot though), we have a lot of new infos. So in the close future, it is not only about the machine but it is about : 

* Machine (with sensors onboard + realtime communication) 
* Controlled environment
* Software analyzing behavior :)

And we need to urgently work on the documentation on the website and publishing the specs (sorry!), and eventually a step by step for each protei up-to-date... Also the fact that Protei is a collaboration of Open_Sailing & randomwalks, needs to be way clearer, so much work to do... :) 

Some pictures
mechanics
The fabulous Kisoon !
That's how simple this machine is.

Electronics tinkering :
Diagram
The real thing 
tinkering 
wireless communication of sensor data to computer :)

Webcam tracking + real time path algorithm by Sey Min
Path analyzed with Proce55ing

Next larger scale evaluation (outdoor with huuuuuge Protei)
We also have a korean presentation here

You can see the presentation online, or download as pdf (14mb)

Filed under  //  Electronics   Korea   NABI   Open_Sailing   Protei   Robot   Sensor   Seoul   randomwalks  
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Protei-002

 

By Open_Sailing + randomwalks
Cesar Harada + Sey Min
Thanks to 
LA Bucket Brigade : http://labucketbrigade.org/
Suzette Toledano Becker : http://suzettebecker.com/
with the support of V2_ : http://v2.nl/
Based on the T37 of Tippecanoe Boats : http://modelsailboat.com

 

Protei is an unmanned articulated sailboat designed to pull heavy loads upwind, in particular oil absorbent boom as a "long tail", to clean up oil spill in remote areas or in bad weather. Protei is needed to replace human labor exposed to toxic pollutant and in hurricane time. 
Protei-002 is an articulated robot, the test went OK. I had to trim the sail smaller, add weight at the ballast, make the electronic access higher to allow more lateral tilt. The fact that the electronic is not well protected is a big problem : as soon as there is too much wind, the boat tilts a lot and fills with water, so I was not able to conduct extensive testing, quickly I had shortcuts on the machine. For those who didn't see, Protei-001 was a super cool front-steering robotic sail-boat. Time is running out, instead of working more on Protei-002, I'm building Protei-003, inflatable, bigger, stronger, faster, more powerful, coming soon !

Filed under  //  Electronics   Gulf   NOLA   Oil Spill   Pontchartrain   Protei   RC   Robot  
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