The autonomous underwater vehicle "Pipsqueak"

A team of freshman students was presented with the ambiguous challenge of designing an AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle) the size of a wallet. A Micro-AUV would be small enough to avoid many of the transport problems. Because of the potentially simple design of such an AUV, purchase and maintenance costs could be kept fairly low. An AUV such as Pipsqueak would likely be deployed into a lake river, where its size and the environment would allow it to investigate most efficiently. It could also be released in low current ocean areas, such as along beaches or coral reefs. In the future, we predict that as the Micro-AUVs develop and become more efficient and powerful, they might be used for deeper and more intense exploration. In this design, depth is sensed with a pressure gauge such as the Omega DPG1000. Temperature is measured with temperature sensors such as the Seabird 3Bfplus. Images of the surrounding environment would be useful in gathering scientific data. We specified using a CCD or CMOS camera that can interface with the micro controller and satisfy the volume requirements. There are large numbers of low cost, compact digital imaging cameras available today that can be readily incorporated into Pipsqueak. We propose to use the prebuilt RAMCAM from Spectronix. The dead reckoning, inertial based navigation system would be used for this vehicle. This system would have two rear facing horizontal thrusters, and one top facing vertical thruster, which will allow for turning as well as up and down motion.