This year our RoboSub team has made some good progress towards our submarine design. Our mechanical team has been busy in CAD working on parts such as our camera enclosure, magnetic dropper, and various aspects of our hull design. They have also been working on doing basic water tests for servos as well.
On the electrical side of things we have been continuing work on designing PCB boards for power distribution and integrating sensors with our Cube Orange controller. Also, they have set up a test bench with a raspberry pi to conduct motor control tests. We have received hydrophones from one of our sponsors Oceancomm and have been looking into planning out which hardware components we need and how to connect them to the hydrophone in order to extract signals.
On the autonomy side of things, we have been hard at work learning about the ZED2 camera interface and various object detection models. We have been able to get our Nvidia Jetson flashed properly and running, allowing us to test deploying code on the real hardware that will be controlling the submarine. Lastly, the autonomy team has been in contact with mentors from our other sponsor, Brunswick, and have received very helpful feedback on approaching object detection and localization challenges underwater.
