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In English Bay off West Point Grey in Vancouver lies an ideal spot for catching Dungeness Crabs - a wonderful delight to eat. My first experience crabbing was dropping a trap off a friend’s boat en route to Chinook Salmon fishing in the Geogria Straight. It’s not unusual to catch your limit on Spanish Banks if you know what you’re doing and to buy the equivalent at the local fish market will cost you almost $100.
Dungeness Crabs
This summer some friends and I went out in Kayaks and were quite successful at catching our limits. Google maps on the iPhone helped us to locate the trap after a paddle around the bay. Being on the water with a 3G connected smartphone is pretty handy.
On another occasion, while trolling on a Salmon fishing mission after having dropped the trap, we pondered how many crabs had entered the trap. At the same time internet radio streamed care of the iPhone’s 3G internet. I got thinking how cool it would be if we had a 3G link to a web camera down below to show us what was inside. Next thing you know I was drawing up plans for an autonomous crabbing vessel.
The vision:
The vessel is monitored and it’s location is controlled from any web browser over the internet (using a smart phone or laptop from a nearby vessel or even the shore). You can instruct the vessel to go to a know crab spot and drop the crab trap. Then once there are enough crabs in the trap, the vessel pulls up the trap and brings it back. While the trap is deployed the vessel acts as a buoy and remains tethered to the trap.
The reality:
It’s a cool project with little, if any, commercial potential, and it would take some time and equipment to pull it off. Maybe I could get some students at the local university or technical colleges involved. Maybe there are others who would collaborate. I do like crabbing and anything that can get me out into the outdoors while playing with hardware and software makes me happy. I may start to piece something together bit by bit, time permitting. Then again I’ve got a lot of other stuff to do and maybe just blogging about it will get it out of my system.
The approach:
Pontoon Boat with Trolling Motor Mount
Electric Trolling Motor with Electric Steering
The first step is to build a software operated vessel. This pontoon boat from Walmart with this electric trolling motor looks promising. Even without computer control this setup would be handy for fishing and crabbing.
For the brains of the system, some custom software on a single board computer (like the BeagleBoard) or a smart phone running Linux or Android are possibilities.
Beagle Board
To drop and raise the crab trap payload an electronic winch could attach to the vessel.
As time goes on more features/services could be added incrementally like:
- underwater camera streaming
- Internet connection
- navigation system using GPS and eventually radar and sonar
Perhaps this is nothing more than a pipe dream. It’s funny though - the more people laugh when I tell them about it, the more interested I become in seeing this autonomous vessel take sail. The same people will stuff their faces with fresh crab if it becomes a reality. The last time I built a robot was in university with an HC11 brain and that was one of my favorite projects ever - an autonomous maze mapping robot. Building robots is fun!
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