News

A new marine platform has been designed to replace the “ARGO II.” The “Nautilus” will have dual pontoons.

The team setup a old drone to test our Pixhawk 4.0, which will be used to control the boat thrusters.

The team was able to obtain six 8″ diameter pontoons that will be used to build our new boat, the Nautilus, which will compete in the 2021 RoboBoat.

The team found a Honeywell HMR3000 Digital Compass in the unmanned lab. Turns out it belongs to the boat team; that’s us. It has been tested and will be added to ROS to assist with navigation.

The tank used simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) to create a map of its environment.

Finally, the tank is up an running and after several design modifications is able to map and navigation autonomously although much work is left to do.

Progress on our tank test platform is slow, but steady.

The team was able to repair the tank and affix a deck where the boat equipment will be mounted for testing.

The tank would become our land based test platform.

The team mount the GPS and LiDAR to the wagon we use to move the boat to perform testing. This makeshift setup allowed us to begin the process of learning how to process of adjusting the settings to provide the desired output.

The boat’s camera system will be the e-CAM130_CUXVR multiple cameras for Nvidia Jetson AGX Xavier. It allows high resolution video to be transferred in real-time to the Xavier to assist with mapping and navigation.

Here’s a screen rendering of the LiDAR data. If you look closely, someone is excited about the progress.

The Velodyne VLP-16 Puck LiDAR will collect data about the distance to objects surrounding the boat. This data will be used by the Nvidia Jetson AGX Xavier to build a map of the boat’s environment and to help with navigation.

The team has selected the SI-TEX Compact V104 GPS manufactured by Hemisphere to serve as our GPS.

The team selected the Nvidia Jetson AGX Xavier Developer Kit to supply the brainpower for the boat.

The team printed the replacement thruster bracket on an Ultimaker 2 Extended+ 3D printer using a file created in Solidworks after the original bracket failed.

The team used Solidworks to design a replacement Thruster bracket after the original bracket failed.

Our teams trip to Tallahassee, Florida to visit the Florida Capitol and show off our project.

The team tests the Argo II, a boat inherited from a previous team. The test went well, but identified some issues with the design of the boat and installation of the thrusters leading to a bracket failure.