Obstacle avoidance for boat?

Do any of you use any kind of obstacle avoidance in auto mode? Not having obstacle avoidance makes auto mode very unreliable, the boat could hit anything. Ive looked into lidars, but apparently they don’t work well on small RC boats.

We’re playing around with Oak-d AI camera’s - cheap and amazing.
Im working on power problems on the thruster at moment. Once that’s sorted - we’ll start trialing this unit on the water. Key is to not crash into other boats once out of line of sight…

I looked up Oak-d. Its very interesting. Is it easy to ingetgrate with Ardupilot, or does it require a lot of tweaking and or coding for obstacle avoidance?

Digest this:
Oak-d

I have been working on rotating radar integration on boats due to the questionable reliability of lidar and ultrasonic, yuri has the radar running on the bench but its not been tested on the water yet.

My plan is a dual approach, radar for long range and lidar for close in, for anything the radar might miss.

I have created a lua script for shallow water avoidance that will switch the boat into loiter mode if its on an auto mission and the water gets too shallow along with sending an alert to the ground station. It has only been bench tested so far.

Another user has shown how to use cheap ultrasonic parking sensors as a depth sounder, its not good enough for mapping but it should stop you running aground.

Are you planning on using oak-d for obstacle avoidance?

Anything i can read anywhere about boats and radar for obstacle avoidance? Didn’t find anything.