The mechanical subteam is responsible for mechanical design of the robot, including frame design, capsule design, electronics enclosures and mounts, structural design, spatial efficiency, actuators, and CNC machining.

The electrical subteam is responsible for the power architecture, sensing systems, onboard computation hardware, and microprocessor firmware. The largest success this year was in shrinking and simplifying Cthulhu’s electronics stack down to 2/3 of the previous size while also extending the capabilities and modularity to create a fully featured platform for informing and running the codebase.

The computer science subteam writes software to control the robot, handling everything from sensor fusion to motion planning. Most recently, the CS team successfully transitioned from a legacy codebase to a more maintainable Docker and ROS based system, adopting industry standards.

The computer vision subteam uses stereo and monovision to locate items underwater for the robot to aim at to complete our underwater tasks. Recently they have acquired a sonar system in order to accurately determine an object’s distance from the robot.

The Acoustics Subteam develops specialized hardware and software to locate an underwater pinger. This entails designing and soldering filter and amplifier boards for analog hydrophone data. Most recently, the team is writing signal processing algorithms to calculate the location of the pinger.