Palomar Physics and Engineering Club AUV for Robosub

What is our Project?:

The Palomar Physics and Engineering Club is developing an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle for the Robosub Competition, an international student engineering competition where we as a team are tasked to develop an underwater vehicle to perform a series of tasks. We are Community college team and as we need to optimize our small budget wherever we can we are seeking a sponsorship as we are in need of high quality PCBs and would be grateful for your consideration.

What do we need?:

Over the past two years we have been developing the design of our AUV mk1, a compact underwater robotic platform that has an onboard RGBD camera, AHRS via a 9DOF IMU and a Barometer, and 5 axes of motion including linear xyz movement as well as roll and yaw rotation.

AUV mk1 is powered by a 4S (14.8V) Lipo battery and utilizes custom PCBs to distribute power to our thrusters and onboard computer, and secondly interfaces with two microcontrollers, one that acts as our flight controller and one that manages our emergency sensors: Battery life/health, leak sensing, and our e-stop.

What are our boards?:

Power Distribution Board:

The PDB intakes the XT60 connection from our Lipo and distributes it out through fused connections to hexfets which output to our thrusters. The hexfets are managed by a optocoupler that is controlled from our sensor management MCU. There is also a regulated 5V output to our onboard computer which also powers our FC/SM board as seen below.

Flight Controller/Sensor Management Board:

Our FC/SM board integrates all our our AHRS sensor signals to our Flight controller MCU which then sends the proper output to our ESCs via six PWM outputs. Our Sensor management MCU handles all of our important sensor signals and communicates with our onboard computer as well as shutting off our thruster power at the low level in the case of an emergency situation.

To Conclude...:

We hope you are able to assist us in our endeavors to produce our AUV! We are looking forward to continue to allow our current and future members to be able to demonstrate and improve their engineering skills even at the community college level, as well as giving them leg up in their future goals with our organization!