Our New AUV: Barbarossa!
Our 2022 AUV is designed to complete tasks while maintaining its stability. We started this project with hull design. Our hull design’s main goal is to hold vehicle in one piece with minimum weight and make mounting external tools such as torpedo launchers and marker droppers easier. To accomplish this goal we designed a box-shaped hull with two tubes and 8 thrusters.
Tubes help us to send electronics without a worry of leak and thrusters allow us to steer the vehicle. We placed two torpedo launchers between the tubes to mount them with our tube mount.
Our main goal designing gripper was efficiency through simplicity. In order to pick up a large variety of objects we needed a dynamic design that can open or close rather quickly and easily. We had 2 options: we could use waterproof servos or we could use a pneumatic cylinder that can provide linear motion in a breeze, speaking as an experienced ROV team waterproof servos failed us underwater several times about assembly of gears so we opted for pneumatic cylinders.
The design we settled to use has 2 claws to grip with a mechanism which allows it to run symmetrically. We always prioritize symmetry because in case of a partial failure in the system, the broken part can be restored just by looking to the other side and you can halven your spare parts because they are identical. With a simple design we reduced our margin of error to almost 0. Whilst designing our torpedo launchers we had many questions in our minds since we did not design a torpedo launcher before. We could have used pneumatic systems again but because of the lack of experience we had we chose to design a spring based system.
Our torpedo launchers consist of 4 sections: The main hull, torpedo, spring, and firing system. The hull has a shaft to wrap spring around, a launch cover in order to prevent spring from launching off the system itself, and the outer part. The launcher is hold tight with the firing pin and with a quick motion triggered by the underwater servos,which we told before that we dont trust with gears so we bound it with nylon threads, the system is released and the spring launches the torpedo.
Our marker system is a tube surrounding the marker and has a moving platform at its bottom to release it.