Cambridge Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

posted Oct 15th 2008 11:49am by Caleb Kraft
filed under: classic hacks, robots hacks

The Cambridge Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, built for the SAUC-E Challenge, is a fantastic example of UAV construction. The competition is to build a UAV that can complete an underwater assault course. This baby has a full computer inside it, based off of the worlds smallest full featured x86 motherboard, the Pico-Itx. It has a 1GHz EPIA PX 1000 Board, 1 GB of RAM, Wireless Network capabilities and runs Ubuntu server 8.04.

The CUAV suffered from leaks which ultimately cost it the competition, but the information on the build is fantastic. They have detailed pages upon pages of information about the Mechanical, Electronic, and Software aspects of the design. They even went back in and added notes from what they learned during the competition. The project is also outlined in much shorter form on the mini-itx website.

[thanks Vesaines]

Comments [9]

tagged: cuav, mini-itx, submarine, telemetry, uav, unmanned underwatter vehicle

Reader Comments

Small point: these ‘bots are AUVs or in the military context UUVs. Never referred to as UAVs – those fly, not swim.

Posted at 1:00 pm on Oct 15th, 2008 by Matt

Beautiful work. really kickass stuff.

Posted at 1:20 pm on Oct 15th, 2008 by Gryphin

I was going to say the exact same thing as matt.

Posted at 2:33 pm on Oct 15th, 2008 by RT (Panzer Time!)

Sweet! I actually used to be on a AUV team that attended this same competition. Of course our team was the elite and dominating team SubjuGator (UF), the first team to win the competition three years in a row (2005-2007)… Our bot has used full x86 computers for several years now. We also run Windows! Robot Studio and Windows drivers kick major ass compared to wasting time with the Free/OSS stuff that makes you jump through never ending hoops…

Visit http://www.subjugator.org for details on a three time world champion design instead of reading up on how to make a leaking torpedo! I kid! I kid!

Posted at 3:03 pm on Oct 15th, 2008 by GatorSean

sounds like they threw too much money at the problem.

Posted at 3:07 pm on Oct 15th, 2008 by Man On Fire

anything of value on their website is forbidden.

Posted at 4:50 pm on Oct 15th, 2008 by robo

“your license will expire in 7 days”

“Your activation period has expired”

Windows.. LoL

Posted at 5:53 am on Oct 16th, 2008 by 3a

This reminds me of the torpedoes in the movies “Crimson Tide” and “The Hunt for Red October”.

With a few design changes, this can be turned into a missile. We can build our own WMD’s now! Just like the pros!

DOD? CIA? NSA? Are you reading this?

Amazing times we live in. Amazing times.

Posted at 9:06 am on Oct 16th, 2008 by captain

The build quality is awesome, in my opinion they’d deserve a prize just for that, but I’d change both the operating system and the mainboard: Ubuntu server isn’t the best thing for a nearly embedded platform, and you can get enough power to process camera data in a board that consumes less than 1/4 of a 1GHz pico-ITX.
Perhaps, being sponsored by Schlumberger, they chose the quickest way to solve the problem without being concerned about expenses.

Posted at 10:33 pm on Oct 16th, 2008 by matt

Cambridge Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

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