Inspiration
Diving deep
For gathering ideas for our project we mainly focused on the theme, which made us think about ways to implement it within our creation. The main spark was struck by the moto of this hackathon: "Diving deep", to what we said let's create something that will allow us to do that, which is how we came up with the brilliant idea of creating something that dives deep - submarines.
What it does
After debating whether we make a physical remote-controlled submarine robot or a simulation of it, we chose to make a simulation since it has more scalability and applicability. What the project does is it simulates a water environment, regarding all the physics behind it, and a 3D model of a submarine in it, which can be controlled by user's input either through the keyboard or a joystick.
How we built it
One half of the team worked on the 3D modeling of the submarine using the Elise Software, while the other worked on building the code for the Water Environment and the controllability of the robot. Both, during the coding and the designing of our project, all the physics laws that applied were considered. For testing the dynamics of the submarine 3D model we used Elise's simulation environment, and for testing our ROS code we used Gazebo's software.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge was making the first steps of diving into new frameworks like ROS and Elise, especially Elise since none of our team members had any experience with working with it. The second big challenge we encountered was adapting and merging all the files into one functional program, which we had to fix by searching for and installing new packages and libraries that would help us make the program work. Lastly, the most time-consuming challenge was using analogue joystick to control the movement of the simulated uuv.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Managing to build a 3D model of a submarine by using Elise's software. Figuring out how to simulate an environment in gazebo using ROS code. Figuring out how to control the movement of the submarine.
What we learned
Code in ROS, use python and c++ scripts, importing libraries and packages, do useful research, modeling in Elise, using gazebo...
What's next for Submarine
Figure out how to improve the submarine by implementing scanning abilities and adding sensors.
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