Fish detection (Roboflow)

Optional

This is an optional dependency. It is only needed for the Fishing Tournament event, where fish appear at varying positions and orientations that a fixed image template can’t match. Everything else in Autopilot — every other event, scenario, and the whole dashboard — works without it. Skip this page entirely unless you want fish detection.

The Fishing Tournament fish detector uses an object-detection model (find-fish-ssnpa/6) served by a self-hosted Roboflow inference server that runs as its own container. The model runs locally — your screenshots are sent to 127.0.0.1:9001, not to a cloud API.

What you need

Requirement	Why
The inference container	Runs the model on your machine.
A Roboflow API key	The inference server uses it to download the model weights on the first request (cached afterwards).

1. Get your Roboflow API key

Create a free account at roboflow.com, then retrieve your Private API Key — see Roboflow’s guide: Find your Roboflow API key.

The key must have access to the workspace that owns find-fish-ssnpa/6. If you point WOS_FISH_MODEL_ID at your own trained model, use a key for that workspace instead.

2. Set the key

The detection request is made by the API process, so the key must be present where that process runs.

Production (Docker) — set it in the environment, or add it to a .env file next to docker-compose.prod.yml:

ROBOFLOW_API_KEY=rf_your_key

Local dev — add it to .env in the repo root, then restart uv run play (the key is read once at process start):

ROBOFLOW_API_KEY=rf_your_key

3. Start the inference container

You have two ways to bring the container up: a one-click widget in the dashboard, or the command line.

From the dashboard (recommended)

The Fish detect page (Debug → Fish detect) has an Inference service widget at the top. Press Start and it pulls the image, starts the container, and shows live progress through four stages — Install → Download → Start → Ready — alongside a liveness line (container / health) and a collapsible log window. Stop shuts it down again (the container is kept, so the next start is instant). No shell needed.

The widget drives Docker for you, so where it works depends on how the dashboard runs:

• Local dev — works out of the box; the dashboard process reaches your host’s Docker daemon directly.
• Production — the dashboard runs inside a container, so it needs the host Docker socket mounted into the api service and an image that ships the docker CLI. Both are off by default — mounting /var/run/docker.sock grants the container root-equivalent control of the host, so only enable it on a trusted, loopback-only deployment. The socket mount is pre-written (commented out) on the api service in docker-compose.prod.yml. Until you enable it the widget reads “Docker unavailable” — use the command-line path below instead.

It reuses the same ROBOFLOW_API_KEY from step 2 (read from the API process environment) and the same inference_cache volume, so weights are shared with a container you start via Compose.

From the command line

The inference service is opt-in, gated behind a Compose profile so the default up never pulls this image. Enable it with the full profile (which also starts every normal service):

# production — full stack including inference
ROBOFLOW_API_KEY=rf_your_key docker compose -f docker-compose.prod.yml --profile full up -d

# local dev — full stack including inference
docker compose --profile full up -d

Already running the default stack and just want to add inference? Naming the service starts it without restarting the rest:

docker compose -f docker-compose.prod.yml up -d inference --pull always   # production
docker compose up -d inference                              # local dev

The server listens on 127.0.0.1:9001. The first detection pulls the model weights (using your key) into the inference_cache volume; after that it works offline and survives restarts.

Optional tuning

These have working defaults — override via environment variables only if needed:

Variable	Default	Purpose
ROBOFLOW_API_KEY	(empty)	Roboflow private API key. Required for this feature.
WOS_INFERENCE_URL	http://127.0.0.1:9001	Inference server URL (the prod api service uses http://inference:9001).
WOS_FISH_MODEL_ID	find-fish-ssnpa/6	Roboflow model id to run.
WOS_FISH_CONFIDENCE	0.4	Default confidence threshold.
WOS_INFERENCE_TIMEOUT_SECONDS	30	Request timeout.

Verify

Open the Fish detect page in the dashboard (Debug → Fish detect). The Inference service widget at the top should read Ready once the container is healthy — if it shows Stopped/Not installed, press Start and wait for it to finish. Then pick an instance on the Fishing Tournament screen and press Run detection. Detected fish are drawn as boxes with confidence scores.

If you see “Inference unavailable: … HTTP 401 …”, the API key is missing or invalid — re-check steps 1–2 (and remember to restart the API process in dev so it reloads .env).