Underwater Robotics at Ohio State

Want to meet the team and make some friends? Join us for a casual game night filled with card games and fun!

Come join us for a STEMBot Recruitment Event!

You’ll get to meet the team and build and test a STEMBot kit. Check it out in the Maudine Cow Room at the Ohio Union. Everyone’s welcome!

Interested in engineering processes? We offer specialized teams in mechanical, software, and electrical engineering, as well as a business team! No prior experience is required.

If this sounds interesting to you, come check out one or all of our welcome events! Learn more about what we do and meet the team.

More details to come so keep an eye out for more posts about welcome events!

Hello UWRT! Happy March!

This month in UWRT: Every Sunday 12:00 pm ET S'ups! - Come join us for our team meeting to hear about weekly updates! You can find the zoom link in teams!

Elections: Elections will be on Sunday, March 14th during S'Ups (join with usual zoom link). Please attend to vote on our next president and vice president. Votes will only be counted for those in the zoom!

Shoutouts: Each month we will be shouting out team members who are making a difference!

Robbert Pafford! Robert, you were nominated for your tremendous effort on your projects. It has been noted that you are working very long hours to make sure everything is getting done. Your work exceeds expectation and you have been able to complete many projects for the electrical team in your short tenure!

Caroline Eggett, Gretchen Stommel, Christina Javorka, and Sydnie Truesdale! Welcome to the team! We appreciate your work so far and your quick learning!

This year's leadership! With elections coming up, thank you for your leadership and guidance on the team this year! For those of you graduating, you will be missed!

Sub-team Meetings and Updates:

Electrical: Every Thursday 7:00 pm ET Electrical meeting! - Please join using the link on the electrical channel on teams. This past month, the electrical team has entered a bit of a slow season as we await orders to be placed and received. We have finalized the first round boards for Titan and are working through some speed bumps getting them manufactured. The boards team has spent most of this down time working on the order sheet for parts. In addition, we have started a few new projects. We are working on a connector breakout board for the camera cage side of Titan, so that we can simplify the wiring from the electronics cage to the camera cage, and we are working diligently on cabling needs. We have spent a little time in the shop recently working to put together a rough prototype of our actuator torpedo circuit, and have started investigating some of the lingering issues with Puddles. Lastly, the electrical team has taken a large step forward with developing new firmware for the actuator board, new firmware for the copro board, and a new ROS driver for the copro. The new versions of the firmware are being designed to work with puddles and Titan without any major changes in the code. Although the electrical team is in a bit of a slow season, we are still hard at work hoping to avoid a burn from the creeping deadlines.

Software:
Software’s main meeting is Sunday after S’ups. Project teams generally also meet mid-week on a project team-specific basis. If you’re interested in what the Software team does or want to get involved, get in touch with Anden via Teams PM, [email protected], or just show up at a meeting! The Software Team is all settled in for the semester and has been chipping away at our projects! Our Navigation team has finished up some building blocks and is nearing some working prototypes for the Gate and Buoy tasks, as well as working towards prequalification during our next pool test. Our Perception team is successfully generating some basic data for the Buoys to feed into our vision training system, and is making small improvements and tweaks week-by-week to improve its accuracy. Lastly, our Mapping team has everything put together and is starting to test a basic prototype in the simulator (which will probably break, but it’s all theoretically working!!!). Software has a lot planned for our next pool test, which is planned for the week of the 14th-21st! We will be testing what we didn’t get around to last pool test (Script Ohio, Drag Calibration, MoveIt Trajectory Testing) as well as some new things (Pole Detection, the Mapping System, Gate/Buoy Tasks, Prequalification). We hope to do a mock run of the pool test a few nights beforehand in the simulator similar to last time, so be on the lookout for that!

Business:
Every Monday 6:00 pm ET Business meeting! - For zoom link please PM Julia Gerard (gerard.52) on teams. We now have more of a formalized business team! The business team is working on a few new projects this month focusing on social media posts, team apparel, and sponsor relations. If anyone is still interested in getting involved, feel free to reach out to gerard.52!

Mechanical:
Every Tuesday 7:00 pm ET Mechanical Meeting! - please reach out to tosh.8 for more information. The month of February has been very productive for the Mechanical team! We've been hard at work machining parts for our new robot, Project Titan. The team is done with the wings, and is almost done with the internal electronics cages. We're getting some of the more complex parts machined by outside vendors, and we're excited to get those in and start assembling our new robot! As always, If you're interested in learning hands-on Mechanical Engineering skills, reach out to Patrick Tosh at [email protected]

Meet the Team Monday: If you follow our instagram, you will notice that we post meet the team Monday's where we share a bit about each of our team members. We will be giving all active members the chance to take part in the posts this year! Currently, we are looking for anyone that would like to be featured on the team instagram! Please PM Julia Gerard (gerard.52) on Teams if you are interested.

2021 Sponsors: As always, if you have contacts at any company or a company you think would be a good fit please reach out to Julia Gerard (gerard.52).You can view our current sponsors and sponsorship packet on our website (uwrt.club)! Feel free to share with anyone you think might want to help out! If you are interested in helping us contact sponsors- please reach out to Parth Parekh (parekh.86) or Julia Gerard (gerard.52)!

Membership:
Join UWRT today! If you're ready to become an official member please fill out our membership form on our website (uwrt.club). Feel free to direct specific questions to our executive board.

Collin Barack - President - barack.4
Parth Parekh - Vice President - parekh.86
Julia Gerard - Treasurer/Business - gerard.52
Flip Barker - Electrical - barker.569
Patrick Tosh - Mechanical - tosh.8
Anden Acitelli - Software - acitelli.2
Blaine Miller - Project Lead - miller.8545

Hello UWRT! Happy December and Happy Holidays!

This month in UWRT:

Due to winter break meetings are not mandatory! We would love to see you if you can make it!


Every Sunday at 12:00 pm ET S'ups! - Come join us for our team meeting to hear about weekly updates! Join with this link: https://osu.zoom.us/j/96006851452pwd=RnpPbFJBUHo3SVFRN0IxQ1VYVFRTZz09
(We will not be meeting on Sunday, December 27th)


Every Wednesday 5:30 pm ET Mechanical meeting! - Please join with this link: https://osu.zoom.us/j/96734139407pwd=SDRvMnVvMTRkdkZZd0R5TkpleVZwQT09

Every Wednesday at 8:00 pm ET Software meeting! - Please join on the teams link inside of the software channel.

Every Thursday at 7:00 pm ET Electrical meeting! - Please join using the link on the electrical channel on teams.
(We will not be meeting on Thursday, December 24th)

Looking ahead!
January 20th at 7:00: Business Team Recruitment Meeting - Are you or someone you know interested in learning more about business? Do you have a friend that's a business major and looking to gain some experience for their resume? Are you looking for another way to get involved with the team? The business team may be right for you! Please join us for this short meeting discussing some of the responsibilities of the business team and how you can get involved. Open to the public! Please tell your friends!

With questions, please contact Julia Gerard ([email protected]).

Sub-team Updates:

Mechanical: The Mechanical Team has been working hard at manufacturing the new robot. Simple pieces have been cut via waterjet and are ready to assemble, while more complex parts are being sent out to workshops to be machined via CNC. The team is excited to tackle new challenges as parts come in, and the robot is steadily assembled.

With parts being finalized, new projects are taking shape. Panels are being designed that will allow the new robot's tool packages to be fixed to the chassis in many different combinations. This will allow the robot to be used for more than just the competition. Additionally, shrouds are being designed and produced to cover the thrusters' rotating blades, improving the robot's overall safety. Students interested in these new projects, as well as robotics in general, should reach out to the Mechanical Team Lead, Patrick Tosh, at [email protected]

Electrical: The electrical team completed our first round of board design reviews. The team showed off their designs and offered critique and valuable feedback to help improve functionality and robustness. Our lighting and acoustics teams are hard at work too! Our lighting team completed their project and submitted material to be ordered--next step: construction. The acoustics team started working on the circuit part of the project, while simultaneously continuing to make progress on the heading algorithm. The circuit part of the project will include amplifiers and filters to clean up and boost the signal from the underwater microphone. Everyone is working hard on their projects and we are making great progress. Moving forward, we will slow down a bit for break, but by the start of next semester, we will be putting in orders for our boards to be manufactured and, eventually, constructed. Students interested in these projects should reach out to the Electrical Team Lead, Flip Barker, at [email protected]

Software: The Software Team was a little bogged down the last month with exams and finals, but got some cool work done! Our navigation team has made some great progress with putting together the systems behind task code, our perception team has done great work preparing more data sets for training our new perception system, and our Scylla team has made some great improvements to the application!

We hope to get a lot of work done over break; You can catch us at our first break meeting on the 13th after S'ups in Teams! We hope to get a few behaviors down for navigation, take steps towards doing full-scale 3d mapping with our new perception system, implement some new Scylla features, and get work started again with the simulator on reinforcement learning and various other improvements!

Anyone interested in getting involved with Software should reach out to Anden Acitelli at [email protected]; we're always looking for more people to get involved even if you don't have much experience!

Business: The business team has been continuing to contact new sponsors. We are holding a business recruitment meeting next month to get more people involved and start the transition toward a new leadership team for next year (more information above). If you know someone that may be interested please forward them this email! Please contact Julia Gerard ([email protected]) with questions.

Meet the Team Monday
If you follow our Instagram, you will notice that we post meet the team Monday's where we share a bit about each of our team members. We will be giving all active members the chance to take part in the posts this year!

Currently, we are taking suggestions for posts on a nomination basis. Do you know a team member that's working hard or has made an impact on you in some way? Nominate them here!

We will be reaching out to the nominations for permission and more information through Microsoft Teams Chat.

2021 Resume Book Submissions
If you want your resume to go to our sponsors this year- make sure you get that in here!

2021 Sponsors
Sponsors! We are currently looking for sponsors for the 2021 school year! If you have contacts at any company or a company you think would be a good fit please reach out to Julia Gerard (gerard.52).

You can view our current sponsors and sponsorship packet here! Feel free to share with anyone you think might want to help out!

If you are interested in helping us contact sponsors- please reach out to Parth Parekh (parekh.86) or Julia Gerard (gerard.52)!

Membership
Join UWRT today! If you're ready to become an official member please fill out our membership form here. If you still have questions about the membership process or the different subteams you can find more information here. Feel free to direct specific questions to our executive board.

Collin Barack - President - barack.4
Parth Parekh - Vice President - parekh.86
Julia Gerard - Treasurer/Business - gerard.52
Flip Barker - Electrical - barker.569
Patrick Tosh - Mechanical - tosh.8
Anden Acitelli - Software - acitelli.2
Blaine Miller - Project Lead - miller.8545

If you have friends who are interested in joining UWRT feel free to forward them this email! Happy holidays and have a relaxing winter break! Please continue to stay safe everyone! Hopefully, we will all be able to gather next semester!

Julia Gerard
Treasurer & Business Team Lead
The Underwater Robotics Team
[email protected] / [email protected]
http://uwrt.club/

In honor of today being the last day of Women’s History Month we are highlighting some of the incredible women on our team!

Reminder that tomorrow the team will be MakerX The Columbus Maker Expo tomorrow between 10am and 4pm at the Ohio State Fair Grounds. Stop by our booth to learn more about our team and what we do!

With the team's unprecedented growth this school year our workspace had to go through a major overhaul! Here are some pictures to see the progress we've made in the past few months! @ OSU Center for Automotive Research

to over winter break where our the team's president Jennifer went back to her alma mater West Geauga and spoke to the middle school robotics team about her time on UWRT and showed off Stembot!

The team can't wait to go to in a month!

The Underwater Robotics Team

Calling all Underwater Robotics Alumni! The college of engineering is offering a special 3-to-1 match for every donation, for every dollar donated the gift will be matched 3 to 1, quadrupling the impact of your gift!

Follow this link for donations: https://buckeyefunder.osu.edu/project/16560
Make sure you enter Underwater Robotics in the comments! Thank you for your support!