Mini Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (Mini‑AUV) — RoboSub 2025 thumbnail

Mini Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (Mini‑AUV) — RoboSub 2025

Co-led build of a maneuverability-focused Mini‑AUV with telemetry, PCBs, and MAVROS integration.

Overview

Co-Lead Developer & Engineer

As part of the dual-vehicle strategy, I co-led the development of a specialised Mini-AUV in one summer, designed for movement-focused challenges such as the Gate and Slalom task. Achieved with its lighter build (13kg, a 66% reduction from the main AUV) and an optimized hydrodynamics with a 50% reduction in hull space and 8-thruster layout configuration for enhanced maneuverability.

Notable Electrical Designs:

  • Designed a parallel MOSFET Design for its main power switch, with reed switch compatibility.
  • Implemented a signal-based killswitch for ESCs via SN74HC4066 Quadruple Bilateral Analog Switch
  • Developed telemetry using ESP32-S3-DEVKITC-1, displaying sensor data (pressure, battery voltage from INA219 power monitor, killswitch state) via OLED screen.
  • Designed compact PCBs to optimise hull space efficiency.

Software and Sensors:

  • Integrated DVL A50 by Waterlinked, Bar30 depth sensor and DWE Explore HD 3.0 underwater camera for navigation and perception.
  • Configured Pixhawk 6X with Ardusub firmware for control and localisation.
  • Using vision and ML for perception of Gate and Slalom
  • Established MAVROS communication between Pixhawk flight controller and Jetson SBC.

Final Achieved tasks for RoboSub 2025, contributing to NUS BBAS’ 1st Place in Robosub 2025:

  • Gate: Pass through and Maintain control
  • Gate: Coin Flip (start 90/180 degrees from gate)
  • Gate: Style (barrel roll 8x90 degrees at gate)
  • Channel (Slalom): Navigate through layers with correct channel at correct depth

This write up is still work-in-progress! Why not read the technical report and visit Bumblebee’s website first?

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me!

Highlights

TODO:

competition tasks dev timeline and process competition experience AAR