Electrical Engineering Capstone Project on Dynamic Position System

This paper presents the milestones of a senior capstone project in Electrical Engineering at the United State Coast Guard Academy.Three students worked on their senior capstone project for two semesters.Students applied a combination of knowledge they learned in their undergraduate education to construct an autonomous dynamic positioning vessel.This project consists of the construction and networking designs.The construction designs of this vessel are exterior and interior parts.The exterior part of vessel was constructed with a 20 gallon salvage drum, PVC pipe frame, six 750 GPH motor cartridges, and two sensors, in order to control the heading and position of the craft in the water.The interior part of the vessel includes micro-controllers connected to the MD10C Hbridges, to control thruster speed and are also connected to an on board computer.All inside components are attached to a fuse block in order to protect the components.The networking design consists of various programs to handle the data for the vessel and how the various systems communicate with each other.The controller is implemented in MATLAB, data is stored in MySQL, a python script directs the data, and the Arduino micro-controller transfers data to the motors and from the sensors.A controller has been designed that successfully instructed the vessel to stay parallel to the walls of the tank water laboratory test.This controller only uses the heading motors and leaves the positional motors off.I.