This is the year we’ve been building up to for the past three years: the year that we compete in the Robosub Competition. All three of our subteams have been working hard this past semester to get the sub ready to drop in the water and go. Our competition goal is to complete the semi-qualification task. This task includes moving along a straight line while passing under a gate, then turning around a pole and returning to the start. It’s a simple task for wheeled robots made much more difficult underwater.
Our mechanical subteam has had the submarine structure for a while but has focused on electronics organization and waterproofing this semester. All the materials required to finish the sub and test our components have been acquired. We will be waterproof testing the whole enclosure that carries our sub’s electronics, camera, and computer at the beginning of next semester. We have strict standards to protect our equipment from water damage, so testing comprises two succinct phases: prolonged static subermision and dynamic submersion. Our electrical subteam has finalized the design for the power distribution board to power up to eight of our brushless thrusters. They have also worked on sending PWM signals to drive the motors, worked with our Pixhawk Orange Cube for simultaneous motor control, and verified the performance of all of our ESCs. Our autonomy subteam has an especially large workload to develop a fully autonomous robotic submarine capable of multiple different tasks. The biggest capability they have been developing is localization, estimating the location of the submarine, with our camera. They have been working with the opensource package OrbSLAM3: a package that uses infrared point cloud readings from the camera to simultaneously estimate the sub’s position and build a map of the pool. They are also building a simulated model of the sub and an underwater simulation environment, which are necessary to sufficiently test our systems.
