Project
Autonomous Underwater Vehicle
Full-stack AUV development for maritime surveillance — targeting 150m depth, 30-day endurance, GPS-denied autonomous navigation using DVL odometry, IMU, and depth sensing. Under Blackvolt Technologies.
Problem Statement
Deploy persistent autonomous underwater surveillance without GPS, surface recovery cycles, or continuous human intervention — requiring reliable autonomy in a sensor-constrained environment.
System Design
Sawtooth dive profile for battery efficiency via buoyancy cycling. DVL + IMU + depth sensor fusion for localisation in GPS-denied environments. Failure-resilient architecture with redundant sensor fallback and graceful degradation modes. Inductive underwater recharging under exploration for persistent deployment.
Key Challenges
GPS-denied localisation drift, pressure housing and waterproof electronics architecture, 30-day endurance power budgeting, and designing failure modes that degrade gracefully rather than fail catastrophically.
Results
Active development under Blackvolt Technologies (incubated V-NEST, VIT Chennai). Architecture and sensor stack defined. Target: 150m depth, 30-day endurance.