Abstract:

Founded last year, Tartan AUV is Carnegie Mellon’s undergraduate underwater robotics team which competes annually in the RoboSub competition. RoboSub teams must design, build, and test autonomous underwater vehicles that compete each August to complete tasks related to underwater navigation, object detection and manipulation, and acoustic beacon localization. In this talk we will provide an overview of the competition and our work so far, then discuss our plans going forward. We will begin by laying out the tasks and challenges presented by the competition as well as some background information about the team. We will then discuss the design and implementation of our first vehicle, which competed this past August, before diving into the design of our next vehicle with a focus on our plans for reliability, acoustic signal processing, and underwater navigation and perception. The AUV operates in shallow, turbid water with artifacts such as caustics from the surface and particulates in the water. Approaches such as GPS and LIDAR are unavailable underwater, and robust underwater localization/perception sensors such as scanning sonars or doppler velocity logs (DVLs) are often prohibitively expensive. Our options include visual inertial odometry and landmark-based localization methods. We must overcome challenges such as low ground visibility in certain circumstances and supplement our localization with auxiliary sensor data. We will discuss possible solutions to these problems as well as the challenges faced.