An Autonomous Submarine

The simplest description of the project is a submarine robot. This vehicle must be completely autonomous, (having no tether or outside control) and capable of sucessfully negotiating a course set forth by the contest hosts. The mission describes the functions and capabilities needed to sucessfully complete the coarse. These can change from year to year and are posted by the contest holders in the spring around March, giving each team time to adjust their designs to accomodate the mission. The submarine must first and formost negotiate and navigate the environment of the mission. Secondly, a series of sensors for determining position, external communications with devices planted by the contest host, and finding structures and targets defined by the mission statement. Thirdly do all this better and faster than everybody else.

The Team

Taking on the monumental task of starting this project from scratch is the 2007 robotic sub team.

Mindy Ren, Sam Braiman, Betsy Hilliard and Nick Braiman.

Introduction

Last year, a team was assembled consisting of four Oak Ridge High School seniors, with an teaminterest in math and science. The goal of the mentors was to introduce the students to physics and engineering as a career choice by taking on a specific project. The coaches and teachers involved chose the Underwater Autonomous Vehicle contest held every summer in San Diego as the project. The students spent the year studying the mission and writing engineering specs. A design was discussed and developed using physics, mechanical and electronics engineering tecniques. The student team discussed options , conducted experiments, and developed the prototype with the goal of presenting the design at the contest in August of 2007.



This blog is a collection of their efforts findings and parts of the design, which doesnt tip their hat to much to the competition. As some of the original web pages were located on the private network at the high school, this blog is also meant to allow our generous and very interested supporters more than a glance into the design. It is also a hope of this first team to interest others in engineering as a career. To that purpose we will postthe design processes and the lecture note and results. The schematics and source code will be held back due to some clever secrets the team wants to hold.