Flo

Flo is our grandma sub. Making her debut appearance at Robosub 2016, we competed with Flo until Robosub 2019 and had planned on competing with both Flo and Deb in the water at Robosub 2020. A number of unexpected delays due to a multitude of reasons over the past few years, from manufacturing delays to global pandemics, have caused our assembly progress with our newest manufactured sub Deb to be much slower than we would like. It's nice that we can rely on Flo for our software team to continue testing and tuning their systems, while our other subteams work on assembling Deb and designing new manipulators and even new subs.

Design Overview

Flo has a standard "box"-shaped rectangular hull design with curved acrylic dome. The acrylic dome provides visibility to the entire inside of the sub, allowing for easy and rapid troubleshooting of internal electronics without having to depressurize and open the sub first. She also has 2 small camera domes, which contain a fixed wide angle camera and fixed narrow view camera. She has 3 servo ports and external surface area for mounting additional manipulators, such as torpedo launchers, grippers, and marker droppers. Since Flo has been around for so long, while her main hulls stay the same, we have had the opportunity to try out a number of different manupulator designs with her from servo-driven grippers to unactuated torpedo launchers.