Back to Advice for teams

Below is some of the advice that CUAUV would give regarding running an autonomous underwater vehicle team.

• Keep It Simple Stupid-- start small. Trying to add too many bells and whistles can result in a vehicle that doesn't work at all.

• Start design early. Leaving as much time as possible for building and testing is essential.

• Have a schedule. Write down everything that has to happen to complete your project, then come up with a schedule that seems plausible. Gantt charts work well, but even just a calender with milestones is fine. Your initial schedule will probably slip, but it is good to know what has to be done in what order.

• Interdisciplinary teams work well: a team with ten software engineers will have a harder time putting together a working sub than one with three mechanical, three electrical, and three software.

• Do not get bogged down in design sessions with implementation details. This is especially important when setting general requirements. Decide what your team goals are first, then decide how you are going to do it.

• Set concrete requirements very early on, and make sure that everyone follows them. We try to have requirements set by the middle of September. This means less false starts as a team and less time wasted argueing about what you are going to build.

• Do not focus only on one part of the vehicle: remember that a functional auv needs stable electrical, mechanical, and software. If you ignore any one of them, the sub will not work.

• Document everything as much as possible. This does two things: it makes the person doing the documentation step back from their project and think about where it fits into the big picture, and it preserves details so that if the person who designed a system is not around it is still possible to do maintenance/redesign

• Have all members of a subproject deeply involved with all facets. This both helps knowledge retention from year to year on the team, and makes people more likely to stick around. We consider all engineers on our team design engineers, and all freshmen do design from day one.

• Have design reviews throughout the design process, involving all disciplines: This lets the electrical engineers know what the mechanical engineers are doing etc.

• Test! Testing is essential. Test every component before it is integrated into the system, then test the system as every new part is integrated. The more testing you do before everything is assembled, the less time is wasted during integration with troubleshooting. This means that all boards, sealing elements, and software need to be tested before they are put together.

• Test some more. Once everything is together and mechanicall/electrically stable, spend every possible moment doing software testing. The more time you get doing mission runs before you get to San Diego, the better you will do.