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NOTE 3/16/20: These instructions are currently under development and should not yet be used outside of project developers.

The Makobot Hovering Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (HAUV) is a research platform for autonomous marine robotics research based on the BlueROV2 from Blue Robotics.

These instructions provide a set of hardware augmentations which can be made to a BlueROV2 in order to provide more capabilities for autonomous operation. We also provide a software stack based on the widely-used robotics framework Robot Operating System (ROS) which provides a starting point for research and development.

If you do not wish to augment the BlueROV2 hardware and instead just want to get ROS up and running on a vanilla BlueROV2, please take a look at our bluerov_ros software stack.

todo: photo of Makobot here

About

The goal of this project is to build upon recent advances in low-cost, commercial-off-the-shelf underwater Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) technologies like the BlueROV2 to democratize access to marine robotics research. While there is now far more variety in robust, low-cost underwater hardware and off-the-shelf ROV systems, there is still significant development overhead required to integrate the extra sensors and computing power necessary to use these systems for online autonomy research. Our aim is to reduce the excess time and cost required for others to get started in marine robotics research by open sourcing the designs, software, and lessons learned in the development of this platform.

We encourage contributions of open-source software and hardware from the marine robotics community.

License

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