MEC unveils AUV ‘Black Pearl’
S Vishnu Sharmaa, INN/Chennai, @Svs037
There is always a room for innovation at Mahindra Ecole Centrale College of Engineering (MEC) in Hyderabad. The prestigious educational institution has announced the unveiling of its Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Black Pearl.
The vehicle has been created by MEC students under the able guidance of their professors. Black Pearl is a self-propelled, unmanned, untethered underwater vehicle capable of carrying out simple activities with little or no human supervision.Ā
Powered by NVidia Jetson Nano Single board computer and Arduino micro controller, MECās Black Pearl is a free-swimming, untethered robot boasting of a Logical 270 vertical camera and Raspberry Pi V2 horizontal camera to take pictures of high quality.Ā Sources from MEC say Black Pearl was designedĀ at a cost of Rs. 3,70,000.
Professor Arya Kumar Bhattacharya, Dean (R&D), MEC, ensured knowledge sharing and mentoring on principles of system engineering went a long way in enabling the near flawless output within pre-set timelines.
Further help poured in from faculty mentor Dr. Sebastian Uppapalli of the Mechanical Engineering Department at MEC. He too tirelessly mentored students to ensure work moved without hassles.
The basic team involved in building Black Pearl were led by Sai Madhavan, Ā Sai Kiran Kumar was the deputy team lead. Naval Pattarworked on Fabrication part of the project,
Nishith took care of Design part of the project. Pulkit supervised Simulations, Suresh and Srikanth Gadde both took care of Control and Embedded Systems.
Dr. Yajulu Medury, Director, MEC said their students continue to exhibit strong interests in research and evelopment and creativity in building workable prototype devices and gadgets for different segments.Ā
‘We are very proud to be creating new engineers who work on complex projects, sharpen their technical and project management skills becoming more competitive, innovative and future-ready, true to the āRiseā philosophy of the Mahindra Group.’
Black Pearl is currently capable of executing instructions that have been hard coded into it with high accuracy and with minimal error.
Over the span of the next few months it would be made capable of taking inputs from the sensors and process them and based on the data, it will navigate its trajectory so that it can avoid obstacles, retrieve objects from the water floor and carry out dedicated missions.
Black Pearl is equipped with multiple thrusters, which give it five degrees of freedom-Roll, Yaw, Surge, Heave and Sway and it would soon have a robotic arm so that it can acquire objects. The Jetson Nano and Camera would do the image processing tasks, and employ Neural Networks to help in the task of trajectory planning and optimization.Ā
