BOATS & GEAR NEW TECHNOLOGY, REVIEWS PRODUCTS CRUISING SAILOR

for the and time to make course corrections. Cooler still, some Oscar systems can autonomously control the boat’s autopilot to change course (see below).

In terms of hardware, all Oscar systems consist of a vision unit that has three masthead-mounted cameras, a belowdecks-mounted central processing unit, and a dedicated app to monitor and control the gear.

The vision unit weighs less than 2 pounds and houses two Flir-built Boson thermalimaging camera cores, as well as one color (red, green, blue or RGB) daylight camera. The thermal-imaging cameras deliver a horizontal field of view of 50 to 123 degrees, and a vertical field of view of 32 to 71 degrees, depending on the model; higher-end systems use higher-resolution thermal imagers and can operate at longer ranges. The RGB camera offers a 120-degree horizontal view and a 96-degree vertical coverage. With these cameras, developers say Oscar can detect and identify objects in its video stream that are just 4-by-4 pixels.

Aboard a sailboat, the vision unit is mounted on an articulating bracket and can adjust for mast rotation. The unit also has an inertial measurement unit that electronically stabilizes the cameras’ real-time imagery, which is shared with the CPU via an Ethernet cable