Battery Management System and Power Delivery Board

Project Overview

UBC Subbots is a multidisciplinary engineering design team focused on developing a fully autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) for international competition at RoboSub. The project integrates embedded firmware, robotics middleware, power electronics, perception, and systems engineering to enable reliable autonomous operation in a harsh, safety-critical underwater environment.

Embedded Systems & Thruster Control

• Worked on Teensy-based embedded firmware responsible for thruster control
• Supported both:
• Manual control modes
• Autonomous control modes driven by higher-level software
• Implemented and tested thruster presets to support different operating configurations
• Integrated firmware interfaces to receive control commands and status data from an NVIDIA TX2, ensuring reliable communication between embedded controllers and onboard compute
• Assisted with system-level testing to validate control behavior under real mission conditions

Robotics Simulation & Model Integration (Triton → Steelhead)

• Worked on Gazebo-based simulation development and vehicle model integration during the migration from Triton to Steelhead
• Assisted with updating and validating vehicle models to reflect changes in physical hardware and configuration
• Helped ensure simulation parity with the real vehicle by verifying dynamics, coordinate frames, and sensor placement
• Supported simulation-based testing to reduce on-vehicle debugging during development and competition preparation

Robotics Systems Integration

• Worked within a multi-layer robotics architecture spanning embedded controllers, onboard compute, and ROS-based autonomy software
• Assisted with defining and validating interfaces between low-level firmware and higher-level control software
• Contributed to overall system reliability by supporting testing, integration, and debugging across subsystems

Competition Results & Impact

• Contributed to UBC Subbots achieving semi-finalist placement at RoboSub in both 2023 and 2024
• Helped support stable thruster control across manual and autonomous operation modes
• Played a role in maintaining system reliability and operational readiness during back-to-back competition cycles