Overview
The SONIA AUV (Système d’Opération Nautique Intelligent et Autonome) project was incepted in 1999. The project is managed by a multidisciplinary team composed of volunteer students from École de technologie supérieure (ETS) studying mechanical, electrical, mechatronics and software engineering. The goal of this group is to design and build a highly reliable and efficient autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) which will participate in the Autonomous Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) and the Office of Naval Research’s (ONR) International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition (IAUVC). The team’s mission is also to promote ETS as a leading engineering school and to help its members become better engineers for the demanding industry that exists today.
This year is the 13th edition of the AUVSI and ONR’s IAUVC and the SONIA team will be attending this competition, alongside several other engineering schools from all over the world. The challenges proposed during the competition emulate real life tasks that civilian and military AUVs have to perform. Those tasks are accomplished using different techniques such as image processing and acoustic sensing.
Quick Facts
Concept and Design of the 2010 SONIA AUV Platform
SONIA AUV 2010
This year, the vehicles will have to demonstrate their abilities by performing the following tasks:
- Navigate through an underwater gate
- Inspect and follow pipelines
- Find and connect with specific colored underwater buoys
- Navigate over an hedge (Football goalposts shaped PVC structure)
- Drop markers in bins containing specific shapes
- Send a soft projectile through a specific colored upright square
- Locate an acoustic beacon
- Pick up a “counselor” (PVC structure)
- Surface in a recovery zone with the counselor
- Release the counselor
General layout of the obstacle course
The 2010 vehicle is equipped with all the sensors and equipment needed to accomplish every task of the competition with good results and consistency.
- Two Microstrain 3DM-GX1 Inertial Measurement Units (IMU)
- One Explorer Doppler Velocity Log (DVL) from Teledyne RD Instruments
- Two Unibrain Fire-i Board Pro cameras
- Six Seabotix SBT150 thrusters
- One marker dropping unit
- One soft projectile firing unit
- Four Brüel & Kjær hydrophones with a custom passive sonar signal processing board
- One Kontron 1.5GHz Core 2 Duo ETX embedded computer with 2GB of RAM
- One relative pressure sensor
- One active grabbing device
The vehicle underwent a major overhaul since last year. The external enclosures were completely redesigned. Moreover, the custom electronic components were reviewed and enhanced. Finally, the software platform stability and the intelligence were improved.