roboSub

The roboSub is a continuation of the reefRover project, a submersible drone that autonomously scans marine environments and enables researchers and citizen scientists to collaboratively gather structured image data about coral reefs at unprecedented rates.

NYUAD ROBOSUB is a student-led research project developed in 2021-2022 as part of the Engineering Design Studio of New York University Abu Dhabi. Our mission is to breach the barriers of theoretical education through creating physical machines and simulations of underwater robotics systems. We are currently working on research and development into Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) that are able to address current challenges in today’s maritime industry. The team is looking forward to making a significant impact by providing novel solutions to such problems while paving the road for the next generations of NYUAD Engineering students.

This project utilized the RoboSub 2022 competition as a motivation to experiment with new sensors and actuators on the reefRover vehicle, currently based on the BlueROV platform. As part of this development, the team brought together newly-envisioned elecronic systems, mecahanical systems, computational systems, simulation environments, and machine learning techniques. Perhaps most impressive of all is that the majority of the team were first and second year students, necesarily having to shape their own pathways to learn and apply knowledge from subjects they'd not yet studied in university.

As an extension of, and building off the earlier successes of the reefRover project, the roboSub project lifecycle includes a plan to incorporate its learnings and progress back into serving the goals of the reefRover mission: providing research-grade imagery and structured data about the coral reefs of our oceans.