This season, we decided to branch out and build an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). We believe this will give our team new challenges, since maneuvering and communications for underwater vehicles is quite different than for surface vehicles like we've worked on before. We have designed our submarine to be modular so that it can be adapted to complete a variety of manipulation or sampling tasks.
The preliminary design is done. Our electronics block diagram will be reviewed by mentors from Kongsberg and Arc Boat soon! We have also asked Dr. Andrew Bennett, Dr. John Leonard, and Alex Soo to review our AUV mechanical design since they all have extensive experience in AUVs.
Parts have also been ordered, but because the RoboBoat competition has been moved from June to March, the AUV team is switching over to Ship Happens to help with their mechanical tasks since we are prioritizing our RoboBoat timeline for now.
The team has started to use OnShape as our primary CAD software. It will allow us to quickly share and view each other’s CAD files. We have already created a preliminary plan for the AUV in OnShape, including body design and thruster layout.
