May, 2005
Electro-Logic Machines, Inc. President Helps Student Team build Submersible ROV
Off-the-shelf ethernet based devices used for rapid implementation.
Port Townsend, Washington. A group of high school students has delivered a submersible ROV which they designed and built with the aid of a local teacher and two engineers. The project, which was not affiliated with the school system, was a true engineering task from specification to delivery and documentation. The device was donated to Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's Sequim Marine Research Operations Facility for use in water quality related research. Please see the full text of the PNNL press release
The ROV carries a network based motor controller, video server, and embedded controller. A magnetic Heading, Pitch and Roll module and an intelligent water quality probe supply data to the embedded controller. Power is supplied by nickle-metal hydride batteries carried in the ROV. The tether is an armored ethernet cable running to a host computer on the surface. At the host, data from the ROV is combined with GPS position and time information and recorded in the filesystem. The GUI on the laptop provides real time strip chart displays and navigation control. Navigation is also assisted by real time video displayed from the fore and aft cameras.
Eric McRae, President of Electro-Logic Machines joined project leader Gary McLuen, teacher Tim Behrenfeld and the students for the last year of their weekly and every other weekend meetings to teach programming and help design and implement the software in the system. The embedded controller software was written in C and the GUI/data recorder was written in Python.
McRae believes the project was a great experience for the students: "How many kids can claim to have helped design and build such a sophisticated machine? These guys learned a lot about real-world engineering."
Electro-Logic Machines, Inc. has been providing embedded system engineering and custom TPU programming services to the automotive, avionics, medical and robotics industries since 1992.
