Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV-IITB)

Team AUV-IITB

About Team

AUV-IITB comprises of highly enthusiastic and hard-working technocrats ranging from bright-eyed freshmen to driven senior undergraduates and tech-experienced post-graduates spanning various branches of engineering like Mechanical, Electrical, Software, Aerospace, Material Science and Civil at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. The team works towards participating at AUVSI Robosub Competition, which is held annually in July at San Diego, California. The competition is a platform for students to display their skills in underwater robotics and build a connection with industries working along similar verticals. The competition demands designing and manufacturing of an autonomous underwater vehicle that can perform predefined tasks. This draws upon the expertise in the areas of engineering provided by the multifaceted team. Currently, we are a 40 membered team developing cutting edge technology for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV). The development of an AUV is a year-long process involving design, manufacturing, assembly, testing, integration, and competition preparation. In order to accelerate the development of MATSYA, our team is structured into three sub-divisions viz Mechanical, Electrical, and Software. Every year the team puts in 30,000 man-hours for the development and integration of our AUV MATSYA.

Achievements

Runners-up at Robosub 2016 (amongst 50 international teams)
Finalists in Robosub 2017
Winners at NIOT SAVe 2019 (amongst 14 national teams)
Semi-Finalists in Robosub 2018 and 2019
Winners at NIOT SAVe 2016 (amongst 14 national teams)
Best performance by an Asian AUV at Robosub 2016
Best performance by an Indian AUV at Robosub 2012-2017

Matsya

Matsya

My role in the team

First Year

I joined the team in September of 2018, in my first year, after clearing a two-stage selection process, which comprised of a written test and interview round. I learned a lot of new things in my first year as a part of this team, like ROS, git, bash, etc. Here is a list of the task I accomplished.

Learning to test the vehicle is an important skill that you have to learn as a part of the software subdivision. Testing teaches us that “Things don’t work as we expect them to work”. The code we write may seem to be perfect, but once we run it inside the pool along with everything else, it may fail. And to win the competition, it is utmost necessary to have a robust testing system.

For testing our programs, we first have to run them in the simulator and check if everything is running smoothly, and there is no breaking error in the code. We call this “Simulator Testing”. This ensures that if the code runs on the actual vehicle in the pool, it won’t do something crazy and damage the vehicle. This step also reduces the time of debugging at the pool as we can quickly test the programs on our laptop at our comfort.

The next step of testing is to take the vehicle inside the pool, and recreate the task environment, to test the working of the vehicle. In this, we not only have to learn to debug the software code but also understand the mechanical and electrical aspects of the vehicle and get a grasp of which component might have failed. This process enhances the understanding of how all the parts in the vehicle work.