MATE 2019

The MATE ROV competition is a real world inspired competition that challenges students to build a Remotely Operated Vehicle to solve a set of maintenance and upkeep tasks commonly done by divers. The 2019 season challenge was based around hydroelectric power plant maintenance. Our robots had to look for pollutants in the water, install and remove filters, and check for wildlife in certain areas. We were required to deploy, drive, and retrieve our ROV in under 15 minutes. Our in house manufactured mounting system is designed with modularity and re usability in mind.

The ROV is controlled using a custom propitiatory control algorithm running between two Raspberry Pi's. Commands are given through an Xbox style controller to a Raspberry Pi on the surface. The Pi encodes this data and sends it via Ethernet to the SOC inside the ROV. From there, the PWM signals are sent via GPiO to our companion board that handles the switching of our relay arrays and ESCs.