ASSIGNMENT 3: MARINE SENSOR PLATFORM

The task was to design and create a boat that could race through the Charles while still maintaining stability. While we were proud to say that our platform was able to complete the full length of the course, there were still many areas that could be improved upon with our design.

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As the boat was being designed, the prioritization of stability was placed above speed because if there was no boat to race, then there is no point. This lead to the very wide and stable pontoon designs seen in the boat. The use of a CNC Hot Wire cutter was initially considered due to the accuracy and precision it would produce however, the one in EPIC was not operational during the time of fabrication leading the pontoons to be hand fabricated. A possible improvement to the pontoon design would be to either make them higher in the water (to better withstand choppy waves) or to make them slimmer (to reduce drag and increase the overall speed).

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The physical steering of the boat was designed to have vectored thrust instead of a traditional rudder or switching on and off of the motor. This was done for 2 reasons: 1) so that while turning, no power loss would be experienced as a component of forward thrust would still be maintained and 2) so that the outputs of both pumps could operate through the center of gravity and provide maximum efficiency. 

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The hardware of the boat was also another area that had room for improvement. For this project, an Arduino UNO, Relay Shield, and XBee module was used for communications between the controller and the boat. The methodology of the code was to read and send a value from a potentiometer and rocker switch embedded on the controller and have the Arduino on the boat read, parse through, and perform the action. While logically the code worked (Please see individual codes provided in gallery for changelog), the boat experienced a lag between the time of  control input to the time of performance. It is believed that this lag is due to the refresh and send rate of the XBee shield and can be circumvented through the setting of a higher Baud rate so that more commands are read per unit of time. Another facet of hardware improvement is that there are smaller and more efficient ways to operate the boat in term of electronics namely using a board such as the Adafruit Feather. The Feather has an onboard radio that can be used for communication while also maintaining the functionality of an Arduino UNO but having a much smaller form factor.

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On race day, our boat was unable to complete the course due to receiving and using a faulty and un-chargeable LiPo Battery. This was an unforseen and unavoidable issue. However during the 2nd Race, this platform was able to achieve 3rd Place overall in the entire class.