Prerequisites:  

Courses:  EE 296, EE396, EE496

Focus:  

Description:  

Team Kanaloa is a Vertically Integrated Project (VIP) dedicated to the advancement of Unmanned Systems technologies.  We work with all manner of mechanical design, interoperability, sensor fusion, signal processing, control, machine learning, and project management.  In December 2018, Team Kanaloa participated in the AUVSI Maritime RobotX Challenge; a high-level autonomous robotics challenge aimed at developing autonomous surface and underwater technologies; this is our team video. Team Kanaloa also conducts extensive project work, deploying our various unmanned vehicle platforms for research use.

Advisor: A. Zachary Trimble, PhD, Mechanical Engineering Department

Email: atrimble@hawaii.edu

Overview

The RIP Lab’s Unmanned X Systems (UXS) research group, or Team Kanaloa, is a Vertically Integrated Project (VIP) aimed towards the advancement of Unmanned Systems technologies.  The need for robust software and hardware robot platform(s), often equipped with expensive sensors and instrumentation, creates a high barrier of entry to the field of robotics and unmanned systems.  Following the VIP academic framework, the UXS development group aims to engineer robust unmanned aerial, surface, and underwater platforms for practical applications.  Our research interests are in the areas of sensor fusion-based localization, vison-based scanning and 3D scene reconstruction, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), obstacle avoidance, manipulation, swarm robotics, and autonomous multi-objective decision making algorithms.

Team Kanaloa consists of five subsystems:

• Mechanical design
• Hardware selection and interoperability
• Sensor fusion and signal processing
• Navigation and control
• Mission planning and autonomy

Project Website:  http://rip.eng.hawaii.edu/research/unmanned-x-systems/