Technical Design Review of Duke Robotics Club's Oogway & Crush: AUVs for RoboSub 2026
2026-07-20 • Robotics
Robotics
AI summaryⓘ
The Duke Robotics Club improved their underwater robots, Oogway and Crush, for RoboSub 2026 by making them better at moving, seeing, grabbing objects, and tracking sounds. They added new parts like extra thrusters and a better case to keep the robot steady. They fixed electrical problems and redesigned their sound system to detect signals more reliably. Their software upgrades help the robots understand their surroundings and plan tasks more smartly. They also improved their testing process to ensure everything works well during competitions.
AUVthrustersCFDstate estimationsonarpinger detectionPCBautonomous navigationvision-based task planning
Authors
Patrick Zheng, Saagar Arya, Hung Le, Mathew Chu, Nathanael Ren, Niko Weaver, Isabella Chen, Jill Wang, Raine Cheng, Siddharth Kini, Avrick Altmann, Srinath Iyer, Ivan Chen, Ian Suh, Parker Jones, Pierson Jones, Sebastian deSouza, Suhaani Sriram, Suvas Aggarwal
Abstract
The Duke Robotics Club presents Oogway and Crush, our AUVs for RoboSub 2026. This year's strategy expands on our previously narrowed scope, targeting all four of RoboSub's design goals for the first time: movement, vision, manipulation, and acoustic tracking. This expansion is based on sustained reliability investment across all three subsystems. Mechanically, Crush gained two additional thrusters and a CFD-optimized case, providing pitch stability. Electrically, we addressed accumulated failure points by repairing unreliable connections and upgraded thruster control hardware. We also redesigned our acoustics system, adding a new custom PCB with higher-order filters, significantly improving pinger detection reliability. On the software side, improvements to state estimation, sonar-based object detection, vision-driven task planning, and IVC enable more capable and coordinated autonomous runs. Paired with investments in our testing infrastructure to maximize our limited pool time, we can now attempt a broader set of tasks while maintaining the reliability our competition strategy demands.