Overview
Team SONIA (Système d’Opération Nautique Intelligent et Autonome) was founded in 1999. The project was created to take part in the annual International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition held by AUVSI (Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International). The team has never missed any competition and fought tooth and nail every year to obtain the first prize and the serious bragging rights that come with it. This year, in addition to the continued participation in the 15th edition of the RoboSub competition, the team is bringing its competitive skills and sportsmanship to Italy to take part in the 7th annual SAUC-E (Student Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition - Europe) competition. The team is composed of 27 undergraduates from electrical, software, mechanical and mechatronics engineering. The project is split in three sub-teams (Electrical, Software and Mechanical) working together towards the goal of developing a stable and extensible platform capable of performing many tasks.
The SONIA team will be attending these competitions 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.
Quick Facts
Concept and Design of the 2012 SONIA AUV Platform (SAUC-E version)
Concept and Design of the 2012 SONIA AUV Platform (RoboSub version)
SONIA AUV 2012
For this edition of the SAUC-E competition, every vehicle will have to demonstrate its abilities by performing the following tasks:
- Navigate through an underwater gate
- Inspect a pipeline
- Inspect a mid-water target
- Inspect a wall from a 2m standoff position
- Follow an acoustic beacon located on an ASV (Autonomous Surface Vehicle)
- Surface under the ASV
General layout of the obstacle course
For this edition of the Robosub competition, every vehicle will have to demonstrate its abilities by performing the following tasks:
- Navigate through an underwater gate
- Inspect and follow pipelines
- Find and hit two buoys of a specific color
- Navigate over an “L” shaped lane
- Drop two markers in bins with a specific shape
- Send a soft projectile in a heart shape cut-out
- Locate an acoustic beacon and navigate towards it
- Pick up a PVC pipe
- Navigate to a recovery zone with the object
- Surface in a recovery zone with the object
- Release the object
General layout of the obstacle course
The 2012 SONIA vehicle is equipped with all the sensors needed to accomplish every task of both competitions:
- One inertial system IG-500e from SBG Systems
- One Explorer Doppler Velocity Log (DVL) from Teledyne RD Instruments
- Two Unibrain Fire-i Board Pro cameras
- One MSIS (Mechanically Scanned Imaging Sonar) from Tritech
- Six Seabotix HPDC1507 brushless thrusters
- One marker dropping unit
- One soft projectile firing unit
- Four Brüel & Kjær hydrophones with a custom passive sonar signal processing board
- One Kontron 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo Mini-ITX embedded computer with 4GB of RAM
- One depth sensor
- One active grabbing device
- One leak sensor
- One light
The mechanical, the electrical and even the software aspects of the vehicle were designed to be easy to modify.