Homebuilt ROVs Forum

As part of the second year Engineering course in my high school, we were required to build a PVC ROV with neutral buoyancy, easy controllability, and the the ability to do various tasks. My group went with a pretty conventional design with three motors providing up/down, left and right thrust. We have recently finished building the body and the propulsion aspect of the ROV and have yet to start on components needed to complete the tasks.

So far, this is what it look like. Anyways, any questions, comments... are welcome!

There are two cameras attached to allow us to control the ROV from monitors inside a room.






Propulsion supplied by modified bilge pumps with 140mm PC cooling fans attached. We have managed to get a little more than half of pound of thrust on each of the foward/reverse thrust motors. The center motor has a 80mm fan and can produce about a third of a pound of thrust up and down. The thrust is sufficient for the ROV since it is a pretty lightweight design.

very nice platform!

Very cool, its looking great. What are you using for thrusters?

-Steve

Thanks! I am using modified bilge pump motors with 140mm PC cooling fans attached to them as thrusters. The thrusters that are attached are pretty similar to ducted propellers or Kort nozzles.

I thought I would just update this topic with some images of the completed ROV. The goal for this project was to solve problems that one could encounter in real world disasters (BP oil rig spill) by simulating it. In the end, this ROV was successfully able to turn off a mock up shut off value for a simulated oil pump, grab and insert a short five inch pvc pipe into a larger pvc pipe, disconnect a pvc pipe from the assembly and finally gather various ocean specimen and placing them onto a designated platform.

Construction for this ROV became pretty crude during the later phases due to time constraints. My group had around a week to build and test the arm for the ROV and only had around an hour each day. However, I am happy to see that the arm functioned without any major problems, just minor ones.