My second big project is the autonomous underwater vehicle or AUV, just a fancy name for robot submersible. It's designed to win a competition in looking for beacons (or sea mines or enemy ships?) in lakes ... very filthy Florida lakes (wish I had a picture of the sample lake water to show) filled with fish, gators, sharks, and whales. Actually the fish and gator parts are true, theoretically.
The main hull is made of PVC pipe, same device that conduct your sewer I believe. The two main thrusters at the sides are electrical outboard motors, and there're also two vertical thrusters for depth control run by bilge pump motors. The dome thingy on the right is one of the endcaps, round to reduce drag. It's made from carbon composite, a very tough and light material, supposedly resistent to gator jaws. Of course we don't know for sure if it is so since we only managed to test it with our own jaws (our budget doesn't include the purchase of sample gators). We're supposed to mount all the nice sensor and electronic crap later (hydrophones, cameras, etc.). Maximum speed is ... slow. But submarines tend to go deaf at high speed (yeah noisy turbulence and yapping from their own motors!), so why bother.
By the way, the guy to the right is me. And the guy next to me is ... my slave? There's another one too, and they do whatever I ask them to do, even breathe addictive PVC glue and epoxy crap. Then again once they tried to use my butt cheeks as casts for the endcaps (me having the most streamlined butt in the world). Only thing that stopped them is you could only use my butt once (don't think they can survive the few oven hours needed to harden the composite), and we needed two endcaps. So sometimes the slaves become the masters. That's basically the mechanical subteam, and we were seriously undermanned, having to deal with hull, power management, control algorithm, etc. We were also underarmed since the advisor (electrical engineering professor) rather spend money on electronics and won't get us our tools, forcing us to cut metals with our bare hands (OUCH!!).
That would've been a cool project if it weren't for all the politics involved. Skipping all the details, there were originally two teams from Cornell, and a serious conflict emerged when the advisor forced us to merge. The result: the submersible in the picture never made it to the competition, and there's a brain drain next year as most of our team decided to quit. That really sucked since most of the systems were designed by our team, and I really liked this project. Oh well ... |
