Cornell University Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (CUAUV)
CUAUV is an interdisciplinary project team that designs, builds, programs, and tests a completely new autonomous submarine every year to compete in AUVSI’s international RoboSub competition. The competition is an obstacle course that tests the extent of the vehicle's navigation, recognition, and manipulation capabilities. For more information about the team, visit our website.

As team co-leader, I oversaw 10 month design cycle of the submersible vehicle. We placed 1st out of 35+ teams for three consecutive years. My achievements as leader were acquiring $40,000+ sponsored donations, communicating as the head liaison for team administrative &logistics, leading a team of 40 members to build an AUV.

Mechatronics Team Lead

As mechatronics lead, I worked on integrating mechanical components to the electrical system. The mechatronics system enables the vehicle to manipulate the environment with thrusters, grabbers, and pneumatic torpedoes.

I designed and populated custom circuit boards using gEDA PCB software, validate the circuit using LTspice simulation, and program the on-board AVR microcontroller that handle ADC, serial communication, I/O peripherals monitoring, and other designated tasks of the board.

For the 2014 compeittion winning vehicle, Gemini, I developed the thruster board to handle 8 brushed motor with thermal dissipation and signal isolation. The board had a single connector that would plug in to the receptacle to the vehicle's back-plane that routed wires to peripheral devices. The MCU communicated to the main computer via SPI to control speed and direction of each thruster. The software on the MCU handled PWM ramping to match the desired speed to minimize current spikes during sudden changes, as well as the logic to prevent H-bridge 'shoot-through' that could damage the board. 
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Custom 4 layer Thruster Board for 2014 Vehicle
Once the board is tested to successfully control a single thruster from a power supply, the next stage is to integrate the thruster board to the vehicle and stress test it under load in a tub of water. The stress test would check for instances with rapid change in current draw such as when all thrusters are maxed or when many thrusters are quickly switching directions. The final stage of the vehicle's thruster development was to perform a bollard test to characterize each thruster's performance (Force vs Voltage plot) in order to improve vehicle's control. The software team would then take this data and trim the thrusters accordingly to improve stabilization of the vehicle.