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Our AUV
The Amador Valley High School Robotics Club has constructed an autonomous underwater vehicle for the thirteenth annual AUVSI International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle competition. Named Barracuda Mark IX, its major design goals are stability and flexibility.
The internal components of the Barracuda are housed within a single, 6” diameter acrylic tube.The vehicle itself is propelled by two laterally mounted SeaBotix thrusters controlling speed and heading, and two vertically mounted SeaBotix thrusters controlling pitch and depth. A pressure sensor, inertial measurement unit (IMU), a pair of cameras, and a hydrophone array provide navigation and orientation data to the computer: a BeagleBoard running Angstrom Linux, which provides autonomous control of the vehicle. Each hardware device is associated with a separate software driver in order to keep the software as modular as the hardware. The software is also very flexible, making decisions based on weighted input from different sensors in order to minimize the impact of any single point of failure.