Autonomous marine surface vessels, proven on real water — not just in simulation.

Every sea, upright. Flat water to a force-8 gale, eight seconds each, from alongside, astern and aloft — the wave-predicting autopilot steering through all of it. Demo mode: every reading is the vessel model's, through the code path the hardware uses. See the autopilot →

botboat.ai is a marine robotics and edge-AI engineering practice. We design autonomy for small vessels, prove it on an instrumented 32-ft sailing testbed in live San Francisco Bay conditions, and ship a predictive wave autopilot of our own.

Book a sprint or sea trial The autopilot Buy Autopilot coming soon

The predictive wave autopilot

Conventional autopilots react after the bow has been pushed off course. Ours sees the wave coming and has the rudder moving before the hull slews — a feature racing systems sell for five figures, built for your own boat. Reference kit ≈ $1,221.

Steers ahead of the wave, not after it
Falls back to your existing pilot by design
Learns your hull over its first weeks at sea
Works with hydraulic and wheel drives you already own

What it does, and the videos Kit & pricing

The digital twin steering through a gale

Consulting services & rate card

Fixed-scope, fixed-fee engagements. Every engagement produces contemporaneous engineering logs, datasets and a written report — deliverables you can put in front of your own stakeholders.

🧠 Edge-AI & telemetry advisory sprint

$2,500

per sprint

Autonomy architecture review
Edge-compute deployment plan
Marine sensor-bus integration map
DC power budget & solar sizing
Written findings + 2 follow-up calls

Book an advisory sprint

🔬 Sea-trial validation & benchmarking

$1,500

per 4-hour session

Live SF Bay session on our testbed vessel
Your algorithms against survey-grade GPS truth
Full sensor logs from the vessel's bus
Timestamped benchmark dataset delivered
Weather-contingent, free rescheduling

Book a sea trial

⚡ Turnkey autonomous-systems engineering

$5,000

per engagement

End-to-end autonomy stack build-out
Safety interlocks & failsafe design
Sensor fusion (GPS / IMU / sonar / vision)
Sea-trial acceptance test included
Handoff docs + 30-day support window

Scope an engagement

The testbed

A 32-ft pilothouse sloop refit as a floating robotics laboratory — berthed in Ventura, with regular San Francisco Bay operations. Real keel, real fouling, real interference: the failure modes a simulation never shows you.

InstrumentedSurvey-grade positioning, inertial sensing and a logged marine sensor bus, so every trial comes back as a dataset.

Edge compute aboardVision and inference run on the boat, on the hardware your product will actually ship with.

Trial rangeSan Francisco Bay — tide, chop, traffic and fog within an hour of the dock.

DocumentedEvery trial is logged as it happens, and every engagement ships its logs and datasets with the report.

How an engagement runs

Businesslike from first contact: every engagement gets a numbered Scope of Work, a written deliverable, and an invoice trail.

Intake & SOWSubmit the form below — you immediately receive a numbered Consulting Agreement & Scope of Work.

Scope callWe confirm objectives, platform details, datasets and the sea-trial window within one business day.

ExecutionSprint work or live trial sessions, with contemporaneous engineering and mission logs throughout.

Delivery & invoiceWritten report and datasets delivered with the closing invoice; net-15 via ACH or commercial card.

Start an engagement

Tell us about your platform and objectives. You get your numbered SOW instantly, and a reply from the principal engineer within one business day.