I've very recently started a project (with a few friends) where I will be building an autonomous boat. From a high level, it will be solar powered with a relatively simple motor driven propeller, and some on board sensors and such. It will be GPS guided in that navigational coordinates will be uploaded to the boat and it will then "go there" (I'll leave path-finding out of it).
My background is computer science and I'm more or less just "getting into" the hardware aspect of things. My primary question is regarding design/layout of the control system for the boat itself.
At first pass my intent is to have a main on-board computer (Raspberry Pi perhaps), which talks to several on board micro-controllers (maybe Arduinos). The micro-controllers would report sensor data back to the main computer, which would make decisions and issue instructions to the controllers to drive physical operations (e.g. stop motor, turn camera, activate self destruct).
Is this general paradigm reasonable? or is it fundamentally flawed in some way that I haven't thought of yet?
If anyone would like more information just let me know, I didn't want to rant too much. Thanks in advance!