Since
partnering with Bluefin Robotics in 2000, Connect Tech’s products have been along on some pretty
exciting rides.
Bluefin designs and builds
Autonomous Underwater Vehicles, more commonly known as AUVs, and most of these vehicles have
Connect Tech’s Xtreme/104 adapters aboard. Bluefin’s AUVs have been on dives around the world, to
the depths of the ocean floor and back, even under the Arctic ice cap.
Since they are neither
tethered to, nor towed by the launch boat, they must be fully autonomous, as the name suggests.
CTI’s PC/104 multi-port serial adapters provide the communication link between the sophisticated
sensors and image capturing devices and the brains located within these programmable divers. The
working conditions are extreme, to say the least.
As Dr. Richard Wilson,
Senior EE Manager at Bluefin, explains, “There are not a lot of PC/104 cards that are suitable for
the task.”
Bluefin was founded by a core group of
researchers from the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. Their designs integrate complicated sensors into robust underwater platforms. Their
success is a result of experience gathered from over 14 years of research in the field.
Connect Tech’s
off-the-shelf, optically isolated Xtreme/104s are perfect for what Wilson terms as the “extremely
hostile environment” regularly encountered by the 21-inch survey and 12- inch shallow water
vehicles. “They’re easy to set up and very reliable.”
But Bluefin needed a
customized PC/104 adapter for their smallest underwater vehicle yet – an AUV a mere 9 inches in
diameter. Designed for mine location in shallow water, this project required a customized PC/104
adapter, and Bluefin looked to Connect Tech’s customization program to find it.
When designing a 9 inch
diameter AUV full of sensitive equipment encased in a pressure vessel, even a quarter inch of space
becomes a much valued commodity. To develop an AUV so small and light that a single person could
launch and retrieve it off a dinghy required some creative problem solving.
Bluefin’s request of
Connect Tech? To take the three, 4-port Xtreme boards they normally use in their vehicles, and
condense them into one PC/104 footprint, all the while maintaining the throughput and quality of
three boards.
Dr. Wilson acknowledges
that the Bluefin team might have designed something in-house to reduce their PC/104 stack. But the
time required was impractical. “(CTI) has all the PC/104 knowledge we’d have to get up to speed on.
It would take us years. It’s not worth it.”
Connect Tech’s team of
engineers worked with Bluefin’s engineers to come up with a solution to a request that initially
seemed to be technologically improbable.
CTI’s PC/104 expertise
persevered, and the result is the Xtreme/104 Isolated: A 12 port, electrically isolated adapter
that uses a single PC/104 footprint, providing the same signal integrity and robust communication
features as three Xtreme/104 boards.
The prototype was
delivered to Bluefin within three weeks of finalizing the specifications -- a timeframe that Wilson
admits surprised him. “You never know what you’re dealing with until you get the product. When it
arrived, you could see it had been made professionally, no cutting corners.”
A smaller AUV means no
costly deployment and recovery system. Reducing their PC/104 stack was an important way to save on
space and weight.
Their size and reliability
ensure they are used by the military to recover mines and are used in general clandestine battle
space preparation, as well as in offshore oil field seafloor surveys, particularly for deep-water
installations.
Bluefin’s expertise and
time is best spent researching and designing new platforms for this underwater world. Connect
Tech’s customization program let them concentrate on the task at hand.
“From our point of view,
Connect Tech allowed us to push on with the miniaturization of a component we really needed but
didn’t have the resources or time to develop.”
Wilson was impressed with
the customer-oriented service as well. “It is clear that you can put a lot of trust in Connect
Tech,” he explains, adding it was clear throughout the process that Connect Tech’s engineers were
out to develop a quality product, and nothing less.
Contact
sales to find out more about Connect Tech’s
Customization Program.
