RC Amphibious Vehicle

As part of Caltech's 2015 Engineering Design Competition (ME72), I worked with a team of 3 to create an amphibious RC vehicle. The competition was set up as a Robot Wars style tournament, where teams would advance based on a predetermined scoring system. In order to earn points, teams had to pick up balls in one part of the arena and deposit them in another part of the arena, traversing obstacles along the way. At the beginning of each round, vehicles started on land, and had to make their way into Milikan pond to begin scoring points

Our vehicle consisted of 4 major subsystems: land mobility, the main frame, water mobility, and the electronics. I took ownership of the water mobility and the electronics for our vehicle. This included designing, CAD-ing, fabricating, testing, and ordering the appropriate materials and parts. Throughout the ~6 months spent on this, we created 4 variants of the vehicle, making quick prototypes at various stages to test our design. The final version can be seen below

By far the trickiest part of the entire challenge was water-proofing the vehicle correctly - small leaks claimed many vehicles during the competition. We used a combination of silicone RTV and O-rings to create a strong seal that was also removable to allow us to work on the vehicle during competition day. A full report of the vehicle and the competition can be read here