Autonomous underwater vehicle by Université du Québec

While at the Embedded Systems Conference I had the pleasure of watching a presentation about an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) developed by a team of students at the École de technologie supérieure (ETS), which even my rusty high-school French tells me is the Superior Technology School. The superiority of the school shows in the vehicle, but also in the students that were involved with the design. It is astonishing that this is an undergraduate project. They call the design S.O.N.I.A. for Système d’Opération Nautique Intelligent et Autonome, which my rusty high-school French translates as “really cool gizmo that drives around the ocean all by itself.”

The presentation was by two students at the school, Olivier Allaire and Kevin Larose. In addition, I would also like to copy the names of the 2009 team from the their website:

• Administration Jonathan Ducharme (team leader, software team member), Tennessee Carmel-Veilleux (technical advisor), Martin Morissette (technical advisor), Guillaume Dumont (treasurer, electrical team member)
• Mechanical David Gouffé, Daniel Robinson, Louis-Philippe Lacroix
• Software Jocelyn Pelletier, Marc-André Courtois, Sylvain Lamontagne, Marc-André Loyer, Jean-François Im, François Campeau, François Therrien, Sébastien Martin, Jean-Sébastien Lemay, Liem-Binh Tran, Marie-Ève Benoit, Michaël Bernard, Pier-Luc Caron St-Pierre, Sven Conard, Vanessa Jean
• Electrical Philippe Tremblay, Alexandre Gagné, Cédric Perron, Maxime Larouche, Michael Pelletier, Patrick Lalonde, Stephane Franiatte

It is interesting to see how many software people are needed. Be aware that the earlier teams had larger mechanical engineering headcount since that work was needed at the start of the project.

Here is an overview of the sensors.

The electrical block diagram shows considerable sophistication.

The thermal design is impressive, they coupled the beautiful Kontron SBC to the hull.

There is a 16 bit Microchip PIC to do the motor control for the thrusters.

These International Rectifier FETs form the H-bridge for the thruster drive.

This inertial measuring unit from MicroStrain has 3 accelerometers, 3 gyroscopes and 3 magnetometers.

This is the passive sonar board. The board has a Texas Instruments TMS320F28335 DSP for processing and four Linear Tech LTC6910 for programmable gain amps. The back of the board has LTC1064 filters and LT1167 PGAs. I love the thrash-metal band Slayer shout-out in the lower left corner. Ahh, to be young again.

This Brüel & Kjaer microphone is the sensor for the passive sonar board. Very nice, I have a Brüel & Kjaer sound-level meter I scored off Dovebid. They make incredibly nice stuff.

In addition to my favorite semiconductor companies here is the entire list of sponsors, with a big shout out to Kontron, the embedded systems company that sponsored the presentation at the Conference:

Alubox, Aluminum Association of Canada (AAC), Anodisation Verdun, Association des Étudiants de l’ÉTS, Batteries Experts, Brüel & Kjaer, Bulgin/Arcolectric, CadSoft Computer, Centre Québécois de Recherche et de Développement de l’Aluminium (CQRDA), Circuits Solaris, COOP ÉTS, Ecole de Technologie Supérieure, Ej-technologies, Elcard, Esterline (CMC Electronique), Fond de développement de l’Ecole de Technologie Supérieure (FDETS), Hydro-Québec IREQ, Kontron, LinkQuest, Meloche Monnex, Office Québec-Amérique pour la Jeunesse (OQAJ), ORE Offshore, SeaBotix, Seacon Brantner/Egetec, Solid Concepts, Sun Microsystems, Tektronix, Texas Instruments, Thomas and Betts, Total Diving, Tritech International Ltd, Unibrain and Vector CANtech

It is gratifying to see giant companies like Texas Instruments supporting the effort. In my interview with TI analog VP Gregg Lowe, he said TI is doing a lot to support engineering education, and it shows. Of course the real kudos go to the teams of young engineers that have worked on this project for 8 years. Très bien mon ami, tres bien.

All photos courtesy S.O.N.I.A.