Aquaphoton Academy Remotely Operated Underwater Vehicles

Introduction

Who Are We

Aquaphoton Academy's undergraduate team has been taking the lead in ROVs manufacturing while participating in the annual MATE ROV competition since 2012. The team has since been recognized for its innovation, raking 1st in Egypt's MATE regional qualifications round and 6th in the international round held in Michigan, USA in 2014. This has been followed by a series of achievements listed below.

The academy aims towards introducing the ROV industry with its challenges to the undergraduate community, advancing their technical knowledge encouraging them to be entrepreneurs of the future.

Our aim is to maintain our team's performance through implementing underwater missions with high efficiency and addressing our clients properly which has been thus far showcased in being the best representative of the university in local and international competitions.

About The Competition

The MATE competition in an annual event that requires students to think of themselves as “entrepreneurs” and transform their teams into companies that manufacture, market, and sell “products.” In addition to engineering their ROVs, the students are required to prepare technical reports, poster displays, and engineering presentations that are delivered to working professionals who serve as competition judges. Each year a different set of missions is required to be implemented by the participating teams.

Selected Achievements

1. Best design for our electrical system in the regional MATE ROV 2018 competition.
2. Best robotics team in Egyptian Engineering Day (EED) 2018.
3. 2nd place award for underwater missions in the regional MATE ROV 2019 competition.
4. 3rd place overall in the regional MATE ROV 2019 competition.
5. 3rd place in the robotics category at Alexandria's University Science Club competition.

Our Products

Our latest product , namely "Bombard", is a lightweight, general-purpose ROV designed to meet MATE's 2019 ROV competition. This year we are building a brand new ROV capable of performing extreme maneuvers with the help of a robust electrical system.

This year, 2020, our electrical system is composed of 4 main PCBs (+1 for research and development). We are aiming towards a modular design for better portability in the future. The ROV subsystems are as follows:

1. Actuators board.
2. Controller board.
3. Camera board.
4. Top-side board.

The number of components this year exploded greatly due to different attempts at perfecting our design from last year. Thus, a high-quality SMD board was the best option for us.

Currently, we already have an initial design ready, and we are working on finalizing the design by 3D modelling our boards using Eagle and Fusion pipeline.

Product History

Word To PCBWay

PCBWay is our PCB manufacturer of choice. We have already ordered our electrical system PCBs from PCBWay for the last two years; this would be the third one. For the last couple of years we have been really pleased with the quality of your PCBs and would love to keep working with you. We will acknowledge your support in our presentation as well as include it in our technical report and poster. We ask you to sponsor our organization, so we can stay competitive. We would love to keep acknowledging PCBWay's support on our PCBs as always.