Florida Tech Ocean Engineering Students to Showcase ‘TEC-V’ Device Designed to Explore, Map Underwater Caves

TEC-V stands for Topographic Exploration Cave Vehicle

BREVARD COUNTY • MELBOURNE, FLORIDA – Florida Tech Ocean engineering seniors Stephen Coster and Henry Hill are avid scuba divers. Through their training, they know that some underwater environments, such as enclosed caves, can be dangerous for humans to explore.

So for their senior design project, they decided to create a device that can map caves on its own. TEC-V, which stands for Topographic Exploration Cave Vehicle, is a small, cylindrical, remotely operated vehicle (ROV).

It is nine inches tall, 14.3 inches wide, and 26.7 inches long; that’s close to the size of a standard scuba diving tank. It weighs 24 pounds and can operate at depths of up to 100 meters (a bit longer than the length of a football field). It’s also equipped with side-scan sonars to produce images up to 100 meters away.

The ROV aims to replace scuba divers when surveying hazardous enclosed environments to document otherwise difficult-to-gather data.

It can also explore Florida’s aquifers, survey shipwrecks, monitor ports and harbors, and support autonomous underwater vehicles.

TEC-V’s carbon fiber fairing is hydrodynamic, visible underwater, and rigid enough to protect its internal systems.
How does it work?

The operator controls the ROV via a joystick. Once in an enclosed space, it completes a full sideways rotation; its round, Twinkie-like build creates an efficient, hydrodynamic roll.

While rolling, it sends out sonar pings which plot a cylindrical map of the area. It can identify anything from nearby sharks to umbrellas.

“The overarching goal, from the beginning and still to this day, is to build a small, simple ROV that’s really modular so you can use it for a bunch of different applications,” Hill said.

Coster and Hill were originally inspired by a graduate-level project they collaborated on their freshman year. That instrument was also designed to map caves, but autonomously. However, the design did not get far, so the two undergraduates were encouraged to make it their own, Coster said.

To create their own system, they enlisted mechanical engineering student Gabor Papp and computer science student Mike Dowling for assistance.

“Between me and Henry being the ocean engineers, and having mechanical and computer science engineers, it’s a very multi-disciplinary project,” Coster said. “It has to be for what we’re trying to do, because not any one group can do everything.”

The team spent countless hours learning how to structure the system, from understanding its buoyancy to mapping out how the different components can communicate.

Once they had a grasp on TEC-V’s functionality, they could focus on its design. Its yellow, carbon fiber fairing is hydrodynamic and easy to spot and provides rigid protection for its internal systems. Several drain holes also ensure that water can escape the ROV in less than five seconds.

“We made our initial designs. They were criticized heavily,” Coster said. “We just kept going, iteration after iteration, creating something that would work.”

Over six months, the team deployed TEC-V in various locations, including the Mertens Marine Center, Port Canaveral and several spots west of Florida’s Marquesas Keys during the department’s Marine Field Projects (MFP) cruise.

There, they found that TEC-V didn’t just work, it worked well. While on the MFP cruise, the team thought they found a shipwreck based on objects they could see from the water’s surface. Instead of sending divers to check it out, they tested the ROV’s ability to map the site.

“Using the sonar, we could see that it was actually a reef, it wasn’t a shipwreck,” Coster said. “We saw sharks and stuff…it was absolutely amazing how useful [TEC-V] was.”

The ROV may be fully functional, but Hill and Coster said it still needs some work to complete their vision. Next, they’ll focus on improving its software to better filter erroneous data points and to create a more digestible data plot. They also want to change some of TEC-V’s design to make its roll more efficient.

Eventually, they would like the device to function autonomously. Much of that, however, will be up to the next generation of ocean engineering seniors.

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