KAMBARA Design

Our underwater vehicle is named Kambara, an Australian Aboriginal word for crocodile. Kambara's mechanical structure, an open-frame rigidly supporting five thrusters and two watertight enclosures, was designed and fabricated at the University of Sydney. It is a simple, low-cost vehicle suitable as a test-bed for shallow water research in underwater robot autonomy. Kambara's thrusters enable roll, pitch, yaw, heave, and surge maneuvers. It is underactuated and not able to perform direct sway (lateral) motion; it is non-holonomic. At the Australian National University we have equipped Kambara with power, electronics, computing and sensing. This includes proprioceptive sensors to measure linear acceleration, rotational velocity, magnetic heading, roll and pitch inclination, and depth.

Hardware Design

Mechanical Design

Power System Design

Computing System Design

Camera Enclosure Design

Sensor Suite Design

Software Design

Software Architecture

Communication Design

Interface Design

Visual Tracking Design

Motion Control Design

State Estimation Design

Software Standards and Coding Guidelines

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Oberon Design

Kambara's sister vehicle is named Oberon and is built and operated by the Australian Center for Field Robotics at the Unversity of Sydney as part of their research into Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM).