VT AUVT

The Beginning

AUVT at Virginia Tech was founded in the spring semester of 2002 with a bunch of volunteers and the guidance of Dr. Craig Woolsey and Dr. Dan Stillwell as an aerospace and ocean engineering design team.

AUVT 1.0

The team decided not to enter the competition that summer, since we were new, but instead spent a year and a half preparing for the following year’s competition. “Spock’s Nightmare” was born out of this, since it looked like something out of Star Trek and it was in fact, a 130 lb nightmare to lift. Many will remember this one as the “Journey to the Center of the Earth Submarine.” The submersible was built for about $1000 and donations from various manufacturers. On its second attempt to qualify, it proceded to spring a leak, become unbalanced, and go straight to the bottom with full power. When the divers brought it back up, we dumped about a gallon of water out of it and the computer was amazingly… still running. We did win the most “Bang for the Buck” award, for making the cheapest sub that actually did something. The biggest lesson learned was in fact that VIA makes indestructable computers. Oh yeah, and bring fruit and ice cream on the last day, and you will have many many friends.

AUVT 2.0

We drove back from San Diego a bit smarter, and with huge plans for the fall and spring semesters. The 2004 competiton year brought about a significant change: 6 mechanical engineering students were going to each earn 3 credit hours for their work, and several people were working on components as independent study credit. The senior mechanical engineers were responsible for the hull and propulsion components, with the rest of the team handling everything else. Everything was going great, then the month of June rolled around. The three people in Blacksburg for the summer looked around and all that they had working was a set of 4 motors, a drop mechanism, and a computer. And there was a big sort of for the computer. We needed a hull, and we needed it super fast. Three hull designs later, the old sewer pipe from the previous year was used, based on the success of it not falling apart. Also, there happened to be about 8 extra feet of it laying around the lab. Because of the hull changing shape so many times, this year the sub became known as “Proteus,” or the shape changing God of the sea. A few weeks of “borrowing” various apartment complex pools followed, and we were off to San Diego, for better or worse. Devon and Jenny drove the entire way out nonstop (That’s 40+ hours for you folks keeping the tally) and even arrived well rested enough to actually function and eat breakfast before falling into a deep slumber for a few hours. Then the work began. This year, Virginia Tech once again became notorious as being the only team for which a scoring symbol was created. We attained the achievement of going “Under the Gate, on the Surface” by being severely overpowered and actually LIFTING the PVC gate up out of the water, sliding under it, and dropping it back down. It made for a good joke and several picture opportunities. We did manage to catapult ourselves from dead last to middle of the pack with this achievement, as well as prove that you can turn bilge pumps into real propeller driven motors as long as you use an aircraft prop. And of course, there was the triumphant return of the ice cream and fruit. Once again, we made many friends. The big lessons this year were that locktite doesn’t always… lock tight, that 50 lbs of epoxy can make anything waterproof if you try hard enough, and never let Jenny drive a motor pool van through Phoenix at rush hour. At least we had three people on the drive back.

AUVT 3.0

The 2005 year started with a huge bang, and not in a bad way. Over 40 people showed up to the first meeting, and about 20 of them remained active on the team in some fashion. This was unheard of! This year has seen such improvements as a definite lack of PVC or sewer pipe, nicer home-built and sealed motors, and a small increase in funding and parts supplied. Once again 4 senior mechanical engineers joined the team for their senior design, with the motors being their only goal. They did an excellent job and produced 4 water tight motors for the team’s use. The team finally got on board with the rest of the university and used the laser cutter in the archiecture department to cut acrylic components of the submarine. That year the submarine was known as “Sowerbii,” which is the name of the only freshwater jellyfish. She was mostly clear and hard to spot underwater, like a jellyfish.

AUVT 4.0

The fourth iteration of AUVT fielded two subs, named Clarus I and II, in the 2006-7 competitions.  They didn’t have a historian, so we know very little of their adventures other than the AUV they left us (AUVT 6.0) in little pieces.

AUVT 5.0

AUVT 5.0 was the last of the continuous run for the team, because everyone graduated in the same year (2008).  The team consisted of several students who re-designed the AUV for their senior design projects, but they were not able to complete the AUV for the 2008 competition.  They chose the hull and frame design, and constructed the hull, frame, and end-cap.  They also designed a signal processing all-in-one board for interfacing all of the components with each other, as well as a custom hydrophone interface board.  Unfortunately, some of their design work was changed before being used in a competition-ready AUV.

AUVT 6.0 (Beta)

It’s fall of 2008, and AUVT 5.5 is a freshman team with a mission to reboot AUVT.  Only one member of the six-man team has any experience with AUVs prior to 2008, so we’ve been learning everything from scratch.  The previous iteration of the team only left us with a pile of parts, some of which resembled AUV parts.  We started by cleaning out the work area and sorting out the boxes and shelves of mysterious parts to see what we had.  Exploring the myriad boxes and finding all of the parts we have took almost exactly a year, with every week highlighted by discovering something that we wished we’d had a month ago on a forgotten shelf in a distant corner of the cramped bay.  We knew we had this thing called an “E-Rack” with a computer on it, and the hull with its “End Cap” seemed pretty straightforward, but that was all the knowledge we started with.  The learning curve was long, but slowly and surely we educated ourselves in the ways of AUV, and we became prepared to tackle the task before us.

One of the first issues we faced with a new team was a lack of leadership.  Everyone who knew how to lead the team had graduated the year before, and only one member remained who had witnessed some of the original design process.  Fall of 2008 and Spring of 2009 went by with only minimal progress, and then both the experienced team member and the new team “captain” dissapeared.  We knew the team was fragmented, but we tried to find the best ways we could to work around it.  Whiteboards and wikis offered a solution, but resulted in little practical use.  We are still a strange variant of “team”, with some of the members rarely even seeing each other, but it seems to work.

AUVT 6.0 (RC1)

At the end of the spring semester things were shaken up again.  The final member of AUVT 5.0 graduated, and both our team captain and the mechanical chief engineer left for the summer. The team balanced out a bit when two AE majors from the NSL were assigned to us and work began again.  It was not long into the summer before we realized two things: we don’t have time to write code from scratch, and the “Signal Processing” circuit board that we inherited from the previous version of the team is lacking in useability and reliability.  We decided to switch to code-generating software to help with the programming, and to ditch the all-in-one custom circuit board for off-the-shelf parts.  Initial tests with both aspects were promising, but integration is proving to be tricky.  Every day presents a new challenge from the AUV that has yet to be named, and every day we conquer a new hill on the oh-so-mountainous road to San Diego.  We will rise to the occasion, solve every problem, and be ready when the day comes to show the world what we can do.  We are AUVT, and we will have a completed AUV by July 25, or we will have a very intersting trip to San Diego and just use the AUV at next years competition and spend an entire year debugging.

AUVT 7.0

We did actually make it to the 2009 competition with a working AUV, which is a big relief for all of us.  We managed to place 18th out of 30, which is a decent result for what was essentially one summer’s work.  When we got back to Blacksburg, we began to try to grow the team, and now we have nearly tripled in size, from 6 members to 17.  This boost in available manpower has put us back on track to become one of the top teams in the world.  We are continuing to modify Barreleye and are starting to plan out our 2011 AUV.  Even though the majority of the team is freshmen and sophomores, we have enough team experience to give us an advantage, with nearly 18 years of robotics experience between us.  The team organization is also much better, helping us use our time more productively and not waste time on deciding who is in charge.  All together, AUVT 7.0 is a definite upgrade from the last few versions, and is building another solid reputation as an undergraduate design team.