The Project
Team SeaSearcher set out to design an autonomous survey drone to help researchers collect data from coral reefs, a rapidly declining ecosystem valuated at $172 Billion a year. The autonomous SeaSearcher drone maps shallow water regions collecting image, depth, and GPS data for the researcher to evaluate.
SeaSearcher won the Francis G. Tatnall Prize for an outstanding project showing ingenuity, proficiency and usefulness.
Please enjoy a video of our team's final presentation during the Penn Engineering Senior Design Competition of 2018.
My Role
Phase 1
This was a fantastic project to be a part of, made successful by a design ethos focused on rapid prototyping, testing and iteration. As a team leader I helped guide our down-selection of possible solutions to settle on a catamaran floating drone. I found quick and inexpensive materials for our very first prototype. I and my teammate Alex created pontoons from four polyethylene foam rollers band sawed to a hydrodynamic shape and zip-tied to a ¼” thick plywood bridge. With recycled motors, a donated microcontroller and a waterproof acrylic electronics enclosure (sealed with silicone and an EPDM rubber gasket) the first SeaSearcher prototype set sail in a pool, for testing.
Phase 2
Looking to a more robust hull for our next iteration, I layered fiberglass with resin to wrap two polyurethane hulls that we had made from molds built with laser cut MDF and duct tape, then sanded to shape. I also configured SeaSearcher’s GoPro cameras to play nicely with commands from our microcontrollers, and painstakingly placed and soldered each component of our custom circuit boards designed by my teammate Jay. When our first waterproofing tests of an O-ring gasket in our hull battery enclosures failed due to more flexing than anticipated in our fiberglass lid (resulting in insufficient compression of the O-ring and thus leaks) – I repurposed our original flat rubber gasket design to yield sustainable IP68 seals. I also designed and machined our collapsing bridge beams to achieve suitcase-sized portability - a key customer metric - without compromising our craft’s stability.
This project was done in collaboration with Nikhil Chari, Alex Andalia, Thomas Macchio, Eric Quesada, and Jay Fleisher.
Please enjoy the gallery & highlight reel below!
