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Coconut Pi: An Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Development Project

We are a team of Undergraduate Engineers embarking on an exciting journey into the embedded realm of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Development. The Singapore Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition 2013(link) is an Autonomous Systems Competition organised under the IEEE OES Singapore Chapter and we are participating in this International Competition with participants coming from all over the world, much like the AUVSI scene in the US but this is the first time Singapore is doing it. >The Singapore AUV Challenge 2013 Taken straight from the website: “The competition is a forum to showcase system-engineering skills in underwater environment for budding engineering students. The competition also aims to create more interests within students in autonomous underwater robots technologies. Each team must have a fully functional autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). The AUV may follow a marked line on the bottom of pool. There are three major tasks for AUV. The first task is to cross a gate by swimming under it. The second task is to bump a flare mounted ball. And third task is AUV coming out of water at a designated area. The successful completion all the tasks in the shortest possible time decides the winner. Achieving each task will gain points associated to it. Also extra points will be given based on time taken to complete the tasks.”

The Who

Goh Eng Wei

A student in Computer Engineering specializing in Control Systems and Artificial Intelligence. He will be handling the control systems and dead reckoning algorithms.

Doan Viet Tiep

Viet Tiep is a student from Computer Engineering with specialisation in Embedded Systems. He will be handling the Sonar and obstacle detection.

Kenny Tan

Kenny is a student in Computer Engineering with background in embedded systems design and high level programming design. He will be handling the Computer Vision aspect, path recognition and and flare detection algorithms.

Shanmugam Muruga Palaniappan

A student in Electrical Engineering with specialisations in embedded systems. He will be handling the actuator system and electronics interfacing.

Devansh Sharma

A student in Mechanical Engineering with specialization in Automobile Engineering. He will be working on the mechanical design and kinematics of the AUV.

The What

Our team has been kindly sponsored by RS Components in the design, assembly and programming of the fully autonomous system. Given the requirement of the competition we need to create a highly intelligent system that is completely autonomous and this means that there can be no human intervention  able to navigate waters by itself and that is defined as to be line tracking, obstacle detection and object identification.

Our AUV has been "christened" Coconut Pi, after the Raspberrry Pi as our platform will be based on the Raspberry Pi as the central controller. And here is the logo that we designed for it with a bit of geekiness added it :)

The Why

This competition for all five of us is one of complete voluntary nature and we have taken it up on top of our own final year academics coupled with our Final Year Projects (this is not our FYP if anyone was wondering) which is usually the last mile for any Engineering student at the National University of Singapore(NUS). To us the project is one of hobbyist nature and we are but a group of undergraduates who are passionate in our respective fields and this multi-disciplinary (and so very cool!) project satiates our thirst to do something with our newly acquired skills in our studies at Engineering!

So follow us on our facebook fanpage at https://www.facebook.com/coconutpi or stay up to date as we post our fortnightly blog updates to Designspark! Our team is also open to suggestions and opinions from the Designspark Engineering community. You can either comment on our blog posts or just scroll through our daily pictures and updates on our facebook page and leave a helpful comment or suggestion for us to consider in our development process!

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