UC Davis student-run underwater robotics team is set to partake in international RoboSub competition
By NAREN KRISHNA JEGAN — science@theaggie.org
Robots have been an increasingly present phenomenon in our everyday lives. Some restaurants, for instance, use robot waiters that serve food directly to their customers, while other establishments, such as car manufacturers, use robots as a part of their assembly line. A common feature of robots that we tend to see every day is that they are operational on ground, but not in water.
RoboSub is an international underwater robotics competition that challenges students to design autonomous underwater vehicles that can be used to perform certain tasks both independently and under human supervision. Cyclone RoboSub at UC Davis is a student-run engineering organization composed of over 50 student members who manage everything from business to public relations to systems architecture.
Peter Webster and Jason Daniel Pieck are both fourth-year mechanical engineering majors who co-founded the team in 2022 out of a shared desire to pursue robotics beyond high school.
“We noticed that there was a missing opportunity,” Webster said. “There was a niche that wasn’t being filled with robotics here at Davis. We discussed it a lot, did […] research, contacted other teams and the competition organizers, and eventually settled on the idea that if anyone could start it, we could probably get something good up and running. The rest is history.”
Currently, Cyclone RoboSub has over 11 subteams with multiple members dedicated to each process. With a large number of members, the team has evolved a unique culture of communication, collaboration and mentorship.
“We want to create a culture where people feel like they can come to the team and they can get hands-on experience and do really interesting projects,” Webster said. “We would like to be an organization on campus that provides people with the opportunities to get the hands-on skills that will make them successful.”
William Barber, a third-year computer science and engineering major, shared some of the strategies to the team’s success in managing the vast number of subteams.
“This year, we’ve created more subdivisions than we used to have […] The way we coordinate these teams and help them to actually work together rather than working separately is through a weekly leadership meeting,” Barber said. “We write updates about what we’ve accomplished, what we’re hoping to do and any input we need from other sub-teams to make this work.”
To further enhance the communication, Alexander Zamora, a fifth-year mechanical and aerospace engineering major, explained the overlapping meetings that help facilitate cross-team collaboration.
“Overlap is a big thing when we’re trying to all coordinate and work together,” Zamora said. “I know both William and I spend a lot of time overlapping on each other’s meetings to make sure that the robot will run for the next day, or for the next week or for the next pool test.”
Although they are still a new team, Cyclone RoboSub has constantly grown, experimenting with new features to strengthen their robot. Barber explained some of the software updates that they have been working on.
“One of the things we’ve been going for this year on the software side is modularity, because what we found last year was that our software stack was not modular at all,” Barber said. “It was very hard to replace a software design idea or to work out where something was broken, because it was a big glob [of code].”
Barber then introduced a new system, the Robot Operating System (ROS), that the team is currently implementing.
“ROS is a middleware that we’re mainly using as a way to pass messages between running processes,” Barber said. “We have a little process called a ‘node’ that performs a certain job, such as activating the robot’s thrusters. Another node can then get input from either controls or a command line tool and tell the thrust node what to do.”
Zamora further explained how this new system is benefitting the team.
“Having the computer run the controller, or whatever software on the control side that we want to test on the team laptop instead of deploying it right away, is probably the biggest improvement this year,” Zamora said. “It really is more modular, and that really helps us improve our data exporting and controlling this year.”
Beyond the competition, Cyclone RoboSub is making strides in collaborative research on campus through its research sub-team.
“Our research sub-team is composed of environmental engineers and people interested in field operations working with researchers within UC Davis to figure out how we can equip our vehicle with environmental sensors and aid in data collection,” Webster said. “We’re hoping to also expand that and bring people outside of engineering, like students interested in environmental/marine science, into this team to contribute to that effort at some level.”
Pieck further explained where they hope to take this work in the future.
“This quarter, we just started a new sub-team aimed at design people/majors who are interested in [user-interface, user experience (UI-UX)] development,” Pieck said. “We are really trying to break beyond the boundaries of engineering only, and [we are] trying to get people involved in projects because engineering problems are everywhere and you need people from all disciplines to be successful.”
Cyclone RoboSub is set to compete in the international RoboSub competition this summer in Irvine, Calif. For more information about the organization, visit cyclone-robosub.github.io/.
Written By: Naren Krishna Jegan — science@theaggie.org
