Adding an 11th Thruster the the Raven ROV

We’ve added an 11th thruster to the Raven ROV to allow active pitch control!

Raven ROV in action

It’s been a busy spring testing and tuning the Raven ROV.

First Tank Test with Raven ROV!

We’ve successfully completed our first test of the Raven ROV in the UW test tank.

New turbid dataset from "Quantifying the degradation of optical algorithms in increasingly turbid mediums"

We’ve just posted two datasets from our Oceans 2021 paper.

Summer Interns Report: BlueROV Team: Autonomous Position Tracking With Commercial ROVs

A report from our summer intern team working on autonomous, vision-based tracking using a pair of BlueROV robots.

Sample Stereolabs Zed2 imagery at short ranges

All data taken with our Stereolabs Zed 2 through SDK version 3.3.1

Here is sample stereo data at 2k with the target at 20cm:

Note there’s pretty good coverage over the flat plane of the target. As shown on the right, the paper is reconstructed as a plane, the tape measure to the right of the paper is also correctly reconstructed at a greater distance (not obvious from the image, but the range to the tape measure is approx correct).

MaSCOT Project Final Report

I’ve posted my final report for the MaSCOT project.

More Power!

I haven’t discussed the results from initial MaSCOT testing in great detail — though some sample data has been posted.

One of the big take-aways for me was that two BlueRobotics Lumen R1 lights is simply not enough. Unfortunately, only two lights fit within the power budget dictated by my PoE system.

So, we went ahead and re-engineered the power system, purchased a new tether which includes both gigabit and power conductors, and purchased four more BlueRobotics lights. The rest of the system is still being assembled, but I daisy-chained the lights and did a first successful in-air test (with PWM control) today.

See also part 1, part 2 and part 3

I designed the board in Eagle, design files are on GitHub.

{:.center} (click image for PDF version)

The board is very straightforward. Lots of 0.1" header for connecting to the Jetson dev board and then breaking those pins out to pads. A TI MSP430FR2311 in a 20-pin TSSOP is the brains of the operation. I purchaed a MSP-FET just to have one around, and used the standard “full” 14-pin pinout using Spy-Bi-Wire for communications. The MSP-FET can power the companion board for testing (selected by JP9). The power and reset lines are grounded by 2N7002 FETs.

MaSCOT on Github

I’ve stared migrating my MaSCOT design files to Github: