Unmanned surface vehicles for undergraduate engineering education

For the past two years undergraduate engineering students from Olin College of Engineering have worked to develop unmanned surface vehicles as low cost educational platforms for scientific research. As an undergraduate project, the work on the USV involved the student team in a hands-on experience that included in-house design, fabrication, and field operations. Working dominantly out of the Olin Field Robotics Laboratory the first fully operational vehicle completed an unmanned field test in the spring of 2008. Previously in 2007, two students from this project team presented the academic benefits of this self-directed work for engineering and science education at the MTS/IEEE Ocean's Conference in Vancouver. Here we present the data collected from the first autonomous trials carried out by the vehicle as well as the continued work since the Oceans 2007 publication. This work includes the completion of the mechanical design, creation and verification of a mathematical model of the vehicle, and implementation of autonomous control. Lastly, this paper continues to testify to the core benefits of an unmanned vehicle as an undergraduate engineering project, leading not only a to viable vehicle platform but also an extremely valuable learning experience for the team involved.