Hi all,
It’s been a minute since I’ve posted. Considering that I was, I think, one of the early members of the discussion group, I thought I’d have had more to say by now, but, you know, university, things don’t move that fast. 
And, there’s a snowstorm blowing through here today, so a good time to do this…
Quick review. Elmhurst University is a small liberals arts university in the suburbs outside of Chicago. Our also small Physics Department has been building a mechatronics curriculum to give our students training for careers in case they decide not to go on the grad school (or, I suppose, even if they do). One of the kinda unique things about our department is that undergrads have opportunities to do research work, on a small scale, that they’d typically see in grad school on a larger campus. We’re adding projects that would give those students interested in mechatronics a chance to build things using real life conditions. I’ve described the beginnings of this project in other posts, so I think I’ll leave it at that.
And so, here we are with no oceans nearby, but a really big lake, and I’ve been laying out the outlines of what we might try to accomplish, and I’ve been hoping that some of that would dovetail with some of the Bristlemouth work so that we might be able to help out there in exercising the standards in various ways. So far, I haven’t found the “magic key” that would get us a developer’s kit, but you know, hope springs eternal. And if not, that’s okay. I understand that the kits are going to folks who are actually trying to make a living or have the resources to make a significant contribution, and I’m just trying to give some students some real life experience. It’s all good.
As I’m understanding the discussions I’ve seen or heard, one major focus is connecting passive sensors using Bristlemouth. I can see a huge need there; while we’ll certainly go there with our ROVs, I’m a bit more interested in seeing if Bristlemouth can be used to connect together and communicate with components on the ROV itself, so, thrusters, lights, cameras, sample collectors, photon torpedoes, etc etc. We can exercise that with very simple to build ROVs.
And so, our current status, such as it is…
Overall plan is to build a series of ROVs with increasing complexity and depth capabilities. I’d like to drop one to the deepest part of Lake Michigan, which is either 923 or 985 feet deep depending on who you want to believe. Granted, not the ocean, but still deeper than most small ROVs of reasonable cost can reach. And that is I guess one our secondary goals. Can we build something that can go relatively deep on a limited budget? There’s a 2nd leg to this project flow that might be looking at “ROV swarming”., and there are some interesting communications challenges there.
I’m currently out shopping for the parts to build our first simple ROV. This one is basically being done just for the experience of building it. No particular requirements other than being able to put it in water and not have the whole thing short out. I should have that one built and ready to go in about a month.
The 2nd ROV gets more interesting. While we’ll build it with a tether for power and control, we’ll pretty quickly move most of the ROV management to a Raspberry Pi we’ll be adding and programming. It will control all of the equipment on the ROV. And yes, I can use things like USB and even Ethernet to provide connectivity and communications, but here is where I thought we could experiment a bit with Bristlemouth. Maybe it’s not exactly where Bristlemouth is headed, which is fine. But that linkage from the Pi through some interface to get instructions to things like thrusters or a camera, let’s say, sounds pretty interesting to me. We should be working on this ROV by March although I’m sketching out the plans for it now. Students will be coming into the project at about that time as well, I think.
I’ve been doodling around an idea where we’d have a “smart buoy” like a Spotter with communications. It is attached by tether to a docking station that has an ROV parked. Rather than collecting data from a sensor, tho, we would load a “mission” into the ROV to go off and do something, and then bring back the results. Or, a small swarm of special purpose ROVs operating in a synchronized fashion. Outside of this wacky idea, for our projects, we probably don’t need something expensive like a Spotter. The rest of the developer’s kit could be pretty useful, tho.
Now I don’t have any illusions here. We’re a small school with limited resources. This is a project about seeing what we can build by doing most of our shopping at Home Depot and an online electronics store. But, if I can get the students thinking about the possibilities, and given them the chance to try, then they will have gotten some important experience that they can take with them. I don’t know that we’ll be breaking any new ground here, but I can close with a little story. This past summer, I was up in Door County, Wisconsin (not that far, really from that deep point in Lake Michigan). My wife and I were visiting a nature sanctuary there called The Ridges. Not a very big place, but with a dedicated group of volunteers. Awhile back, they decided to see if they could grow some native orchids there. Nobody knew anything about it; they have no professional scientists on staff. But they tried, and failed a lot, but they started learning things along the way and finally succeeded. Now, scientists from around the world come to visit this group of volunteers to learn what they figured out. So, who knows, maybe we’ll build something that turns out to be interesting. And if we can help Bristlemouth along the way, so much the better.
