Under the supervision of Dr. Michael E. West at RobotLab under Georgia Tech Research Institute, my senior design project included developing a multi-agent system for efficient underwater search missions. Along with five teammates, I helped design and prototype a system that allows multiple AUVs (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) called HydraBots, to collaborate with one another in an underwater setting through a combination of infrared signals.

Hydra bots in action in a pool and the electronics within each one.

The project consisted of two main goal: First, to build cost-effective HydraBot prototype with the ability to transmit and receive data through infrared communication as well as to detect their neighboring robot(s) using a color detection vision mechanism. Moreover, each robot should function for upto one hour on a single charge. To simplify the objective, the project only considered two-dimensional propeller motion.

Once the robots were built the second goal consisted of providing the swarm of HydraBots the capability to perform a consensus algorithm by bringing all robots to a common rendezvous point. Our team was able to successfully build three AUVs and demonstrate underwater consensus where each Hydrabot starts at a random location and aims to reach the centroid of the triangle formed by the location of each bot. The project description video is available here.