Autonomous Underwater Vehicle: Team Fish

An Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) is an underwater robot that is capable of self navigation and movement. Team Fish will design an AUV that is able to find its way through an underwater obstacle course while avoiding detection by another AUV built by Team Shark. This underwater robot by Team Fish will have to operate at various depths and avoid obstacles autonomously without human assistance. Previous teams have completed similar projects of underwater vehicles inspired by marine life, such as the robotic Mantaray and other bio-inspired underwater robots. These previous devices struggled with maintaining depth, navigation, and maintaining a leak-free system. The objective of this project is to utilize older designs, either as inspiration or as a foundation to build off of, to create an AUV capable of navigating obstacles in an underwater course while keeping a low signature to aid in avoiding detection from Team Shark's AUV in future years of the project. The AUV will operate autonomously in RIT's pool at a maximum depth of 12 ft, continuously functioning for a minimum of 30 minutes while detecting and avoiding various obstacles using on-board sensors.