See our writeup in the 2017 DukEngineer magazine: DukEngineer17 Article
We began our year with Bot Battle as a way to introduce underclassmen to both members of the club and the robotics fundamentals we work with. Partnering with the Innovation Co-Lab, we prepared kits, held office hours, and led workshops covering topics from
In 2016, we hosted the first Bot Battle competition designed to get students excited about autonomous vehicles and robotics. The competition took place from 9/24/16 to 10/2/16. Twelve teams came out and competed- each building an autonomous mobile robot with different strategies for
Robosub 2016 has come and gone already. It was a wild ride, and we couldn’t be happier with the way things turned out. Eleven team members flew out to San Diego from across the US, putting their internships and projects on hold for nine
We have finally mounted the DVL, fresh back from Teledyne after receiving a tune-up. We are continuing to fine tune the controls in a series of recent pool tests. Next step, finishing up acoustics and testing the system on board.
Last friday we executed our first fully-integrated test. This involved carefully sealings all the pressure hulls, loading up the golf cart with the robot, the support frame, the ethernet reel, buckets of supplies, laptops, and four people. It took us two trips to actually get
This Friday, we hosted Pratt’s E-Social. This is basically a free-beer-and-pizza that our school helps sponsor every Friday for engineering students. We used it as an opportunity to unveil our new robot for the first time to the community. Reception was positive! Next time: better
We are in the process of potting our cables to their respective Seaconn/Subconn counterparts. This process involves soldering the wires end to end, securing the connected cables in the 3D printed moulds we made, and pour potting epoxy into the moulds. They take 24
We decided to buy a used golf cart! A local shop fixed it up and sold it for a good price to us. Testing team was having a lot of trouble hauling the 150+ lbs of equipment all the way across
The sub is coming together! We have mounted the horizontal thrusters and attached the pressure hulls to the frame. Mechanical is now working on attaching the hull connectors. We aim to do our first swim test next week and begin tuning our PID controllers.