In mid-April Colorado RoboSub decided to officially enter the first annual running of the Rocky Mountain MATE ROV Competition. Pivoting into the MATE ROV Explorer Class, however, required a smaller vehicle. After only two months of intense development and tight budgeting our team resurrected an old hull to produce the newest vehicle in the Colorado RoboSub arsenal, Lazarus. Moving forward, Lazarus will act as both Colorado RoboSub's MATE ROV competition vehicle and RoboSub MiniSub.

Lazarus' PVC frame, strategic light-weighting, and compact frame size makes this sub a standout! Weighing only 20kg and sitting at 52cm x 50cm x 15cm Lazarus requires significantly less power than our other vehicles, making it our most nimble vehicle yet. This also makes this sub easy to transport, maneuver, and more.

From its conception our team has always placed a strong emphasis on the individual creativity and problem solving, both of which came to a head this year as two of our members completed the construction of their own ROVs! During Dive Days, our members were able to test out the vehicles and shared their new knowledge with younger team members.

During the school year we also had some team members mentor the local Boulder High School Robotics Team as they sought to enter the Ranger Class of the Longmont MATE ROV Competition. By the time competition rolled around, our two teams had coordinated to share pools and Colorado RoboSub helped pass on information to assist Boulder as they needed. Boulder High will be competing in the MATE ROV World Championship this August!

To correct edge cases which occurred during our finals run in the 2019 RoboSub Competition, we have given our subs the ability to remember when and where they saw a task. By creating a registry of each task location, the sub does not need to perform task in a location-based order, but instead can traverse the course to hit priority targets before returning to low priority ones.

In previous years we have struggled with the inability of our 7-Camera system to detect the distance to objects of interest. As a result we have added an additional two cameras to our vehicle, bring the count to nine, that will allow us to measure the distance to an object by replicating human like vision.

At Colorado RoboSub we have a lot of cameras on our vehicles, Leviathan alone has 9, and as a result speed is very important to our visual analysis of each camera. To address slow analysis times using Python we have updated much of our vision software to C++ with Nodeleting which has resulted in a dramatic increase in speed.

To both save costs, decrease integration time, and reduce our vehicles environmental impact, out team pulled one of our original hulls (4-5 years old) and revamped it to be used again for our newest vehicle, Papa.

In past competitions our main vehicle, Leviathan, has damaged its own motor when it ran up against the walls of the pool during testing. Thus, for the 2019-2020 season we have introduced a series of motor bumpers to protect our vulnerable motors. Additionally, our newest sub, Papa, is designed so that the frame as to protect the motors, eliminating the need for additional motor bumpers.

To improve future durability, modularity, and maintenance costs we used PVC plastic for the frame of our newest vehicle, Papa. By using a chlorine and brine resistant material we will the pitfalls of our previous aluminum frames such as corrosion, difficulty making modifications, and the increased costs associated with machining and anodization.

Using seven different cameras sampling at a rate of 60 Hz, our main sub Leviathan reaches a level of visual sensing and autonomy unparalleled in the RoboSub competition.

With the intentions of continually re-purposing and iterating on current hardware, both of our subs have been mechanically designed with modularity in mind, allowing for each sub to perform a variety of different mission tasks.

In order to support then demanding computational needs of our autonomous system, Leviathan is equipped with an Intel i7 and NVDIA GTX 1050 Ti

For the 2019 competition, we replaced our clunky, heavy pneumatics container with a smaller, lighter, and more elegant box machined from 6061-T6 Aluminum and backed with Carbon Fiber.

To ensure the protection of our electronic components in an underwater environment we have outfitted the majority of our enclosures with double bore seals to increase redundancy and minimize risk.

By using pneumatically operated droppers we have removed all moving components and reduced points of failure.

To increase the power and range of our torpedoes underwater we introduced aluminum foil burst disks into our torpedo launching system that allow for nearly triple our aquatic firing range!