The boat went under during testing
On our first day of testing the Pixhawk lost its settings. The main thrusters were no longer configured as bidirectional, so the moment we armed the boat they went to full reverse. The boat was pulled under, and everything on board went with it.
We saved it from sinking, but it came out full of water. We took every part out, cleaned all of it, and flushed everything with fresh water three times in a row to get the seawater out, with a lot of electronic cleaner on top. Most of it came back. The lidars did not — those were the one thing that died permanently that day.
That loss mattered more than any other. Both 360° lidars are what give Ligmax range data on every bearing, and the whole obstacle-detection chain — clustering scan returns into buoys, then colouring them from the cameras — starts there. The gimbal we built to hold the bow lidar level survived; the sensor it was built for did not.
Back on the water the next day
We went out the following morning and ran the opening round, roughly twenty-four hours after pulling a flooded boat out of the fjord. It scored fourth. Getting the boat to start at all was the part we were pleased with.
Then it came apart, one piece at a time
The cleaning bought us the opening round, but it did not stop what the seawater had started. Oxidation kept spreading, and components failed one after another for the rest of the competition, which is where the week ended up — fourteenth. The tasks themselves were not as hard as we had expected going in; we simply could not keep the hardware alive long enough to run them.
Rebuilt by the final day
We clawed it back part by part, and by the last day of the competition the boat was close to full function again. Only the lidars and the battery management system stayed dead. Every video below was filmed that day.
