System Overview

Our ShipBot, named The Boat Doctor, is made up of 5 main physical subsystems:

1. Locomotion - Our locomotion subsystem consists of 4 omni wheels that allow the robot to move freely in any direction.
2. Turntable X-Gantry - A single axis gantry mounted on a turntable that allows the robot to rotate and position the base of its arm in the XY-plane.
3. Z-Gantry - A single axis gantry mounted to the trolley of the X-Gantry that allows the robot to position the base of its arm precisely in the Z axis.
4. Robotic Arm - 3 DOF planar arm that allows us to reach and manipulate any object.
5. Granular Jammer - Granular jammer end-effector that allows us to grasp any object.

More details about each subsystem are available in our subsystem design page.

In addition, The Boat Doctor is powered entirely off a 12V battery pack and is controlled by an Arduino Mega, an Intel NUC, and a Raspberry Pi 3. The Arduino Mega interfaces with all of the motor drivers and sensors. The Raspberry Pi 3 communicates with the Arduino Mega and also publish images from its camera. Finally, the Intel NUC communicates with the Kinect v2, processes all of the information from the Raspberry Pi 3, Arduino, and Kinect v2, and subsequently issues commands to the Arduino Mega and HEBI motors as the master board. We also run computer vision and localization algorithms on the Intel NUC to successfully complete tasks given to us in the mission files.