UWRT November 2022 Newsletter

Nov 1, 2022 | Newsletters | 0 comments

Subteam Updates

Mechanical

3D Printer

  • The team has been finalizing CAD designs based on suggestions from a prior design review. A new electronics housing was designed with improved cooling, better wire management, and is cable of supporting larger filament spools. The hotend assembly was also adjusted to be able to swap easily between a standard and high flow hotend.
  • There is currently preparations to have the final design review for the project before ordering the necessary components to complete the project.
  • Once assembled, it will be checked off by EHS members and then tested by printing an army of peanuts.

Actuators

  • Actuator team will be pursuing waterproofing via filling the motors with mineral oil to prevent corrosion and to electrical isolate the motor from the surrounding water.
  • Currently various cases are being designed to house the motor before conducting water tests for reliability.

Lids

  • The compliant brackets worked out successfully, and the lids are now mounted to the rails of the housings.
  • Going forward, new lid designs will begin getting started to make them easier to put on and having the subconns come out the side to minimize cable weight and drag.

Chassis

  • This month the chassis team has been noting advantages and disadvantages of different concepts and have been combining good aspects of different ideas together. Various methods for attaching the battery housing to the chassis were brainstormed as well.
  • The next steps would be to down select a concept to pursue through a decision matrix and create a preliminary design review for the project before pursuing a detailed CAD design of the concept.

Safety Box

  • Significant progress has been made on the CAD of project. Parts have been designed for the components to be mounted on 3D printed brackets mounted to aluminum extrusions to house pool test needs in an organized package.
  • Currently the team is preparing a design review presentation before ordering the components to build the design.

Software

Simulator

  • The simulator team has been working to better develop the custom physics engine for the robot in Simulink. Additionally they came to a very important decision on the further use of Unity, in large part due to the software used in our vision system from our stereo camera vendor Stereolabs.
  • Given that Stereolabs plans to provide new Gazebo simulator (also called Ignition Gazebo) support we will be again moving our rendering engine into the new Gazebo Simulator platform. Additionally the team is working towards having a fully simulated pool test on the first week in November.

RVIZ

  • This month the core team focused on the development of a set of robot control plugins in the RVIZ data visualization tool. This system allows the team to control the robot with a very nice and easy to access system which includes functions for commanding movement, using actuators, starting and stopping robot code, and finally starting, stopping and monitoring our behavior tree system all from the RVIZ GUI.
  • The plugin is mostly complete, but will also include visualizations for important telemetry such as battery voltage, task object locations and diagnostic status.

Robot Map Calibration

  • This month a subset of the vision team also focused on the detection and positioning of AprilTag Fiducial markers in the pool for calibrating our mapping system to the environment. They have worked on a system that allows for the placement of the tag in a precise location at the edge of the pool that can serve as a continuous reference frame between attempts and runs at home and even at Robosub during dock time. It also allows for on-the fly calibration of magnetic orientation changes should any more occur.
  • This system is planned to undergo pool testing at our 11/1 pool test! Hopefully it becomes a helpful calibration tool for our system.

Autonomy

  • This month the autonomy team focused on supporting the new action servers provided by hardware, as well as switching our behavior tree nodes that include blocking action to an asynchronous model. This switch also allowed the team to create an action server for executing the trees which can be terminated pre-maturely should an error condition arise. Lastly they also focused on cleaning up the build system for the behavior tree library to include key improvements such as build time reductions, and better ease of use for error conditions.
  • The autonomy team was also able to begin testing autonomous behaviors in the pool at our 10/9 and 10/23 pool tests. You can see the highlights of this pool test here Super Cut 10/23 pool test.

Vision

  • This month the vision team worked on determining the orientation of the props when in the pool so that we can better understand their location when navigating to them. They were also able to create and train on a miniature data set used to determine the location of the torpedo task holes and use the context of the two being detected together, rather than attempting to discern between the normal and the torpedo variant of the prop.
  • The vision team is currently working on speeding up the model detection runtime as well as refining our detection algorithm to produce better estimates for the mapping system. Additionally they are increasing the size of the data set to determine if we can use the context system in the competition pool.

Navionics

Mark 2

  • Mark 2 boards is currently in the process of design. Actuator circuits have been designed, the ESC board has been routed and ready for review, and the embedded board has had additional components selected and added to the board for new support.
  • Current Mark 2 is undergoing schematic review for various boards, where the circuits are verified to match the specifications initially laid out for the board.
  • The next steps for Mark 2 involve routing the PCBs, and for the ESC board, which has finished routing, a design review will occur.

Mark 1.75 Power Board

  • The Mark 1.75 power board has had its final design changes added from the Mark 1.5 power board into the design.
  • This board is currently going through design review to find and fix any issues found in the design before manufacturing.
  • The next steps for the board after this design review will be ordering and assembly, getting the board ready to run in the Mark 1 electronics until Mark 2 is ready.

Firmware

  • The firmware has been successfully upgraded to be compatible software team’s update to ROS Humble. Firmware has also been created for a separate microcontroller to improve the reliability of the depth sensor on the robot.
  • An update to firmware is currently in progress to switch to ROS Actions to simplify actuator control via software.
  • The next steps for firmware looking into new communication protocols to improve the reliability of communication throughout the robot.

Mark 1 Maintenance

  • The wiring harness has been cleaned up to reduce tangling of the wires, as well as covered to avoid pinching in tight areas. An additional microcontroller has been added into the electronics to improve the communication reliability with the depth sensor.
  • The next steps for the maintenance involve getting the harness ready for the new Mark 1.75 power board.

Business

  • Currently, the Business Team Lead, Mark, is working on a GANTT chart for all projects concerning the Business Team to better manage deadlines and get the ball rolling with each project. This will help the team have a clearer sense of direction and better communication going forward. Additionally, our Operations Analyst, Luis, is meeting with each member of Team Leads to deepen his technical knowledge. The bar has been set high for that role buy our beloved Arko Chatterjee! Marta Koziy, our STEMBot Team Lead, has been leading our redesigning of the STEMBot curriculum and may have secured us not one, but two middle schools to work with this coming semester. Marta has been instrumental in our outreach to the wider community and in organizing tours of our laboratory. Our Professional Development Chair, Matt Ferguson, has been leading new presentations regarding all aspects of professional development during each S’Ups. As a reminder, please ensure you have scheduled a professional headshot to be taken during S’Ups!

Finances

  • The Business Team has two primary initiatives with the Finance group: acquiring funding and optimizing our financial dashboard.
  • We’ve just recently received our award check from RoboSub, which has provided a great boost to the team’s account. We’ve assigned our Senior Financial Analyst, Matt Ferguson, to lead our other Financial Analysts in researching how corporations structure their financial dashboards in Excel, PowerBI, etc.
  • Next steps include securing additional funding for the team and implementing our analysts new recommendations by the end of the AU22 semester.

Social Event 

There are currently no scheduled social events for November but stay tuned into the “Social Events” channel on Teams! There may be a possible Friendsgiving potluck coming up!

Member of the Month

This month UWRT would love to give a huge shoutout to Mitch Oinonen!“I’d like to shout out Mitch Oinonen. He’s been doing a lot of good design work on the safety box project and has been doing a great job leading the project. He has also been a big help wrapping up the design of the 3D printer preparing for our design review.”

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