We are currently in the process of coming up with new designs for our rover. This rover will float on top of the Guadalupe River and look down in order to locate large populations of fish. The new design needs to be able to withstand highly turbulent water conditions, and move in 4 directions (forward, backward, left, right) while maintaining rotational stability. Below you can see 2 preliminary designs that have been taken into consideration and have been modeled on Solidwork’s CAD software.  Many other hand-drawn sketches have been created that may be finalized later.   The biggest obstacle has been fitting the large battery in the rover alongside other potential hardware that will be implemented by our computer engineering team.  The mechanical team plans to finalize which designs are the best fit for our problem by the end of this week and hope to start creating the first iteration of our prototype by the end of October so that we can work out different issues that we may face along the way.

Preliminary Designs that have been modeled in Solidworks.

Below the preliminary designs, you will see the parts we have to work with (from previous rovers) in order to build the rover.  The team is also currently working on controlling T100 Thrusters with an Electronic Speed Control Module (ESC) using an Arduino Microcontroller.  Alongside, we plan to use adopted toolboxes that are installed within MatLab that can help us to interface with the Arduino and create various control systems. Alongside learning about the thrusters and how they work, the mechanical team has been working on updating themselves with Arduino, Matlab, Solidworks, and other potential software that can help benefit us in providing analysis on various designs for the rover.