A Student Not-For Profit Organization In collaboration with

Mesa Robotics Organization

San Diego Mesa College

2010 Journal Paper

Team: Christopher-Lorenzo Carter, Chanya Godzich, Frank Yepiz, Dana Long, Bryan Rhee, Jack Wetzel, Aniket Gade , Angelica Sarmiento, Jordon Lin Advisors: Dr. Michael George, Professor Ron Worley, Professor Duane Wesley, Dr. Colin Bradbury

Abstract
This years entry has progressed from last year by utilizing the existing custom designed and built acrylic hull that implements a double hull structure to insure that our custom built circuit boards are protected. A smaller pressure, tilt and gyroscope sensors have been added to the custom half brain. The inner and outer hull is securely sealed using gaskets and an aluminum outer plate to increase structural integrity. The electrical system has been designed to utilize Lithium Ion batteries for their lightweight and high power-density allowing the vehicle longer run times between recharges as well as minimal impact on over-all weight. Computational algorithms are carried out via Microchip microcontrollers.

1. Introduction
Since 2005 community college students from San Diego have come together in the spirit of hard work, experience and dedication. This work ethic makes up the majority of community college students who transfer to four year institutions to complete their degree. Our members and their organizations have come together to solve real-world engineering problems by using real life experience; experience which they apply in addition to college education to produce solutions. The majority of the students are from Electrical, Mechanical, Aerospace, Civil, Structural, Biological or Computer Engineering with some from Math and Business disciplines. Pacific Nautilus is a Not-For-Profit Student Organization dedicated to increasing the number of high school, community college, and minority students who participate in cutting edge and hands-on engineering projects with an interest in autonomous vehicles. The Mesa Robotics Organization is a member organization with an interest in robotics which makes them a great collaborator. We are made up of members of various organizations interested in advancing the concept and design of autonomous systems with our focus on reduced size and weight culminating in developing vehicles which will have the same capabilities of much larger vehicles by the end of the design and testing process. A student team, under Pacific Nautilus, made up of members of the National Society of Black Engineers and the Mesa Robotics Organization (MRO) will be entering its Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) in this years competition. NSBE and MRO have engaged in research that strays away from its contemporaries and has engaged in a cutting edge multi-use platform. The control system developed will be able to control ground and surface water vehicles in future implementations of these vehicles. Within the custom hull of the vehicle, a series of microchip microcontrollers analyze data from cameras, hydrophones, gyroscope and absolute pressure sensor and as well as output to custom motor controllers to propel the vehicle through the obstacle course.

2. Mechanical Platform
Hull Design
Utilizing Pro/Engineer Wildfire 4.0, precision parts are designed and manufactured in a 3D environment to reduce prototyping time and virtually eliminate human error. It was later established that modeling each individual part of the vehicle and then assembling them within the Pro/Engineer environment was the most efficient process. Beginning with a basic box shaped design, named the Model A, in order to take full advantage of laminar flow, the prototype proved effective in maintaining a steady course by traveling within a single plane of water. This proved essential in the development of the next stage of the design, referred to as the Delta (Delta A). By studying the designs of current Avionics platforms such as the Concord and the F-22 Raptor and adopting the delta wing model, the latest prototype achieved reduced resistance while maintaining its stability.

Our Seabotix thrusters come with Subcon four pin male connectors which we mated with a four pin female wet matable connector.

Thrusters
Three Seabotix SBT 150 thrusters power the Delta A, which are mounted directly to the hull. Two are mounted horizontally to provide forward thrust, while the third is mounted vertically in the front to provide vertical thrust. Each thruster provides 4.85 lbs-ft at 4.25 amps and 19 VDC, with a peak thrust of 6.4 lb-ft by increasing current for short periods.

Wet/Dry Connectors
The outer box uses three water-proof cable glands with through hole bushings in each, one three hole bushing for thruster control, and the other two are 4 hole bushings for the three hydrophones, 2 lights, 2 cameras and a pressure transducer. The inner box has one Seacon All-Wet connector with 24 pin-outs in a pie shaped configuration with six connectors having 4 pin-outs each.

3. Electronic Hardware
Batteries
The AUV is powered by four 11.1 V Lithium Ion 4400 mAH batteries that provide 48.8 Wh at 4A with a maximum of 12.6 V peak and a cutoff Voltage of 7.5 V. Two 11.1 V batteries are used in parallel to offer 11.1 Volts at 8 Amps Max to power the three Seabotix SBT 150 Thrusters.

Each battery has a PCB installed with the battery pack and protects the battery from: Overcharge (>12.6V) Over discharge (<7.5 V) Over drain (>10 Amp) Short circuits Max discharging rate of 4A The three batteries are enclosed in a waterproof fire retardant ABS enclosure with silicon sealing wires.

Dual Access Accelerometer

*The

Seabotix thrusters, when running at 19 Volts and max current of 4 amps, use about 80 watts of power. The thrusters will be running at 11.1 Volts. The thrusters draw 3.75 Amps of current therefore we will use 41.6 watts of power. The H-bridge will be supplied with 11.1 Volts and 8.4 Amps, thus supplying the thrusters with about 93.2 Watts of power.

ADXL202E is a low-cost, low-power, complete 2-axis accelerometer with a digital output, all on a single monolithic IC. It is an improved version of the ADXL202AQC/JQC. The ADXL202E will measure accelerations with a full-scale range of _2 g. The ADXL202E can measure both dynamic acceleration (e.g., vibration) and static acceleration (e.g., gravity). The outputs are analog voltage or digital signals whose duty cycles (ratio of pulse width to period) are proportional to acceleration. The duty cycle outputs can be directly measured by a microprocessor counter, without an A/D converter or glue logic. The duty cycle period is adjustable from 0.5 ms to 10 ms via a single resistor.
* Excerpt from ADXL202E Datasheet

Temperature Compensated Gyroscope

The gyroscope (EVAL-ADXRS610Z) is located on the half-brain (Microchip PIC18F2525). The gyroscope outputs data for yaw readings corresponding to the position and orientation of the Delta A. In the testing process the half-brain was mounted on top of a 3x3 inch wooden board then placed on top of a radian chart. Then running 5V across the half-brain and linking it to a laptop by means serial cable to output data. From the outputs analog angular rotation, data is sent to the halfbrain and converted into a 10 bit digital number between 0 and 1023 then graphed in Excel.

The data generated is then used to maintain a fixed heading via the main horizontal thrusters to increase/decrease for the appropriate motion required to complete individual tasks.

Pressure Sensor
The vehicle determines its depth by way of a custom-built pressure assembly that incorporates an off-the-shelf gas pressure sensor and a diaphragm mechanism. This configuration was chosen to maintain budget constraints and still have reliable, accurate data.

This data is then converted into angles by a derived formula, the yaw sums up 8 periods of 8 measurements each with 64 samples total. Getting an average reading over the 8 periods (approx. sec) divided by 2, filters out some of the noise and gives the average turn rate in the range of 0 to 511 with straight ahead being a reading of about 256 (plus/minus 8), and subtracting 264 from the data gives a positive number for right turns and a negative number for left turns.

The gas pressure sensor is an MPX5700GP from Mouser Electronics. This sensor is actually a gauge sensor that was adapted to function as an absolute sensor by covering its reference pressure port. The sensor is connected across 5V from the half-brain by way of a single cable that also carries the analog signal back to the halfbrain for processing.

Because a gas pressure sensor is being used, a flexible intermediary was needed to translate changes in water pressure to changes in air pressure.
Signal Voltage vs. Depth (diaphram )

LAB-Core Systems Custom Hydrophone

0.227

0.222 ) V ( e g a t l0.217 o V

0.212

0.207 0.0 1.0 2.0 depth (ft) 3.0 4.0 5.0

A number of white papers were published to document the development of the hydrophone system in the course of developing the Pacific Nautilus AUV. The Hydrophones Mathematical Model, Hydrophone Sampling and Pyramid Search paper was developed in cooperation with Pacific Nautilus by Dr. Colin Bradbury who is a respected member of the team and a trusted advisor.

After much investigation into the responses of different materials and designs to pressure, a diaphragm-type mechanism was settled on to fill the role. This design has the advantage of having a small size and being easily constructed with materials readily at hand. Together, these two parts form an assembly that delivers a functionally linear correspondence between depth and output voltage for the operational range of 4 feet.

4.

Software and controls

Hydrophones
Custom built hydrophones are being used, provided by LAB-Core Systems. The hydrophones are mounted to wings below the hull arranged in an equilateral triangle. The hydrophone outputs are fed into a custom built circuit board housing three DSPIC33FJ12 digital signals processors (DSPs) and. The signals are then sampled through a central generalpurpose PIC18F26K20 microcontroller.

The Half Brain is the main logic board for the AUV control and based on the input from sensors it makes decisions on when to drive the motors. The Robot uses three motors, two to control horizontal motion and one to control vertical motion. The motors are connected to ports A and B on the PIC18F2525 microcontroller through an HBridge and are driven by our open source motor controller. The design of the H-Bridge constrains us to switch on only two motors at any given time. The logic to control the motors is centered on this fact and the control software is written with that in mind. The Half Brain, a microcontroller with the PIC18F2525 is programmed in Microchip C and debugging is done using the MPLAB tool for PIC Microcontrollers. The software is broken down into modules to simplify tasks. There are separate modules for ADC, TIMER, Calculation of path based

on inputs from sensors, UART Control and a main module which is the starting point of the code. The software polls all sensors every 1/15th of a second and the resultant data are provided to the calculation module for further processing. The calculation module processes this information and decides on the directions for the Robots path in the next timing cycle. The built-in interrupt features of PIC Microcontrollers are used to control timing sensitive actions.

Motor Control/H-Bridge
The H-bridge circuit board contains three Hbridge circuits derived from the Open Source Motor Controller (OSMC). It accepts the differential PWM outputs from the motion controller board and generates the appropriate power for the three Seabotix SBT 150 thrusters. Each H-bridge circuit can deliver up to 10 amps at 24 volts, whereas the current vehicle only requires up to 4 amps at 12 volts. The use of differential PWM signals eliminates the need for a common ground link between the circuit boards, thereby allowing each circuit board to run on its own independent power subsystem.

Hydrophone array controller

The custom acoustics board takes in analog data from three hydrophones and determines the relative direction to the pinger. The selected microcontrollers for this task are three DSPIC33FJ12 digital signals processors (DSPs) and a central general-purpose IC18F26K20 microcontroller. Each DSP takes the input signal from one hydrophone, performs a 4-pole Chebyshev band-pass filter and then examines the result for the presence of the pinger

The above blocks represent the time cycle and the duration for each time cycle is 1/15th of a second. There is a set of 2 data structures current and next on every time cycle. Every structure is further divided into two parts sensor data and time calculation data. Time calculation data is used to drive the motor. The sensor data is extracted from ADC and is copied into the data section of next data structure and then copied into the current sensor data section of the following cycle. This data is acted upon by the calculation (function for performing calculations on sensor data) and converted into time calculation data of the next structure in the same cycle. It is then copied into the current time calculation section of the next time cycle, and this is the data that drives the motor in that particular cycle. Therefore, the data extracted in cycle 1 is to put to use in cycle 3.

5.

Vehicle Testing

Hull Prototyping
With the reuse of last years hull, the team was able to forgo any additional prototyping and was able to spend more time on repairing and testing the Delta A. The first task to be accomplished this year was to insure the integrity of both the inner and out hull. This task was more time consuming than anticipated and required realigning of standoff connectors, remaking the rubber

caskets, reseated the screw settings, and lubricating the gaskets proved successful. The process was repeated for the outer hull and with proper lubrication and sealing it was a success.

The method for waterproofing is a simple gasket and flange plate design that allows us to access our power site, controller boards, and other parts.

6. Conclusion
The entry of the Delta A (AKA: Fat Man) is the culmination of four years of thought and effort from team members past and present. This idea, in one form of another, has been discussed and planned by some very bright and talented students since our inception. We are very proud of our first custom fabricated hull, motor controller board, H-bridge and hydrophone DSP. Community college students bring life experience as well as curious minds which makes our entry into this competition very interesting. This real-world engineering project gives us valuable skills to get us ready for the employment needs of the future.

7. Acknowledgments
Corporate Sponsors We would like to thank our corporate sponsors who have empowered us to reach new heights and filled us with the confidence that we are headed in the right direction with our research in the field of autonomous vehicles. Both Jerry Gruen & Darci Bushy from Lockheed Martin have been a great source of support and encouragement. Don Rodecker from Seabotix, who is a great mentor in the field of AUV/ROVs, has supported us from the beginning of our project. Brock Rosenthal from Ocean Innovations, Ronald Perez from San Diego Seal as well as Seacon and Microchip have supplied us with needed resources to complete our project. Our newest supporter is Jerry Hall Executive Director of I Love Schools Dot Com, a non-profit, dedicated to helping teachers help our children. All sponsors of Pacific Nautilus are appreciated and we look forward to collaborating with them in the future. Advisors and Mentors The following advisors have not only been an inspiration, but have made our learning and research fun and rich in depth and breath. Thanks: Dr. Colin Bradbury, Dr. Michael George, Professor Duane Wesley, Professor Morteza Mohssenzadeh without whom we would have not made such significant progress. Through the Math Engineering Science Achievement (MESA) Program and Rafael Alvarez, SD City MESA Director, we had three paid Summer Interns with us this year. Special thanks to San Diego Mesa College who has supported this project with open arms.

8. Appendix
Delta A (aka Fat Man) Top View The inner box is the crux of the new design. It contains the batteries, motion control system, temperature sensor, dual axis accelerometer, link to our absolute pressure transducer, custom acoustics board and some room for additional sensors as needed. We will be able to move this control box to our surface water or ground vehicle, reprogram the microcontrollers and control multiplatform vehicles with a single control system. This single source multiplatform approach will replace the current methodology currently employed by our military and civilian agencies that use remote operated or autonomous vehicles. Exploded View Complete

Side View

This is the outer hull through which we slide the inner control box. This acrylic hull design gives the vehicle stability and has increase laminar flow which eliminates two degrees of freedom which allows for simpler single plane control. Inner Box This exploded view shows the complexity and sophistication of our first custom designed hull.

Exploded View Outer

Removable Control box